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COPYRiGHT DEPOSm 



old Truths and New Facts 



THE COLE LECTURES 


Old Truths and New Facts - - 


( ig^s ) 


By Charles E. Jefferson, D.D. 




The North American Idea - - - 


( ^9^ ) 


By James A. Wacdonald, LL. D. 




The Foundation of Modern 




Religion - 


( ^9'(> ) 


By Herbert B. Workman, D. D. 




Winning the World for Christ - 


( ^9^5 ) 


By Bishop Walter R. Lambuth. 




Personal Christianity - - - - 


( ^9^4 ) 


By Bishop Francis J. McConnell. 




The God We Trust 


( ^9^3 ) 


By G. A. Johnston Ross. 




What Does Christianity Mean ? - 


{'^9^2]) 


By W. H. P. Faunce. 




Some Great Leaders in the 




World Movement - - - - - 


( ^9^1 ) 


By Robert E. Speer. 




In the School of Christ - - - 


( ^9^0 ) 


By Bishop William Fraser McDowell. 




Jesus the Worker 


( ^909 ) 


By Charles McTyeire Bishop, D. D. 




The Fact of Conversion - - - 


{\igo8 ) 


By George Jackson, B. A. 




God's Message to the Human Soul 


( 1907 ) 


By John Watson (Ian Maclaren). 




Christ and Science 


( igo6 ) 


By Francis Henry Smith. 




The Universal Elements of the 




Christian Religion ----- 


( ^905 ) 


By Charles Cuthbert Hall. 




The Religion of the Incarnation - 


( ^903 ) 


By Bishop Eugene Russell Hendrix. 





The Cole Lectures for igi8 

dtli'vertd before Vanderb'dt Univeniiy 

Old Truths and New 
Facts 



Christian Life and Thinking as 
Modified by the Great War 



>By 
CHARLES ^ JEFFERSON, D. D. 

Pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle, New York 




New York Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 191 8, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



^ 



(o 



New York : 1 58 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh : 75 Princes Street 



THE COLE LECTURES 

THE late Colonel E. W. Cole of Nashville, Ten- 
nessee, donated to Vanderbilt University the sum 
of five thousand dollars, afterwards increased by 
Mrs. E. W. Cole to ten thousand, the design and con- 
ditions of which gift are stated as follows : 

'• The object of this fund is to establish a foundation 
for a perpetual Lectureship in connection with the Bib- 
lical Department of the University, to be restricted in its 
scope to a defense and advocacy of the Christian re- 
ligion. The lectures shall be delivered at such inter- 
vals, from time to time, as shall be deemed best by the 
Board of Trust ; and the particular theme and lecturer 
shall be determined by nomination of the Theological 
Faculty and confirmation of the College of Bishops of 
the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Said lecture 
shall always be reduced to writing in full, and the man- 
uscript of the same shall be the property of the Univer- 
sity, to be published or disposed of by the Board of Trust 
at its discretion, the net proceeds arising therefrom to be 
added to tlie foundation fund, or otherwise used for the 
benefit of the Biblical Department." 



Preface 

THESE lectures have for their aim 
the indication of a few of the points 
at which it is reasonable to expect 
a modification of Christian opinion to be 
brought about by the great war. It is haz- 
ardous to make predictions at a time like 
this as to the total outcome of the war, for 
no one can declare with assurance what the 
war is going to accomplish. It is not likely, 
however, that there will be any revolutionary 
changes in the Church and her teachings. 
The prophets of evil who declare that the 
Church will be hopelessly crippled are cer- 
tainly mistaken, so also, perhaps, are the 
prophets who picture in glowing colours a 
Church intensely spiritualized and completely 
made over. 

But at various points there will most 

likely be changes of emphasis. Certain 

Christian doctrines will receive a prominence 

which has hitherto been denied them, and 

7 



8 PREFACE 

sundry truths will be pushed into greater 
clearness by the pressure of this vast world 
upheaval. 

C. E. J. 

New York, N. V. 



Contents 

I. The Conception of Jesus Christ . 1 1 

II. The Appreciation of Vicarious 

Suffering 45 

III. The Idea and Practice of Prayer . 79 

IV. The Attitude to THE Church . 117 

V. The Use of THE Bible . . -155 

VI. The Estimate of the World Mission 

OF Christianity . . . .191 



LECTURE I 

THE CONCEPTION OF 
JESUS CHRIST 



LECTURE I 

THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 

THE writer of the last book of the 
New Testament says that when 
he saw Jesus Christ he fell at 
His feet as one dead. This is something 
we do not find in the Gospels. No disciple 
in the Gospels is so overpowered by the 
presence of Jesus as to fall down before Him 
awestruck and unnerved. This is because 
Jesus in the Gospels is in the days of His 
humiliation. He is there in the form of a 
servant and is found in the fashion of a man. 
His majesty is hidden and His glory is 
veiled. But the exile on Patmos, gazing 
upon Jesus Christ as He walks in the midst 
of the world's life, beholds Him in the full 
splendour of His authority and power, and 
when he sees Him thus, he falls speechless 
and overwhelmed at His feet. 

That is a striking description which meets 
one in the first chapter of the book of the 
Revelation. It is the only description of 
13 



14 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

the Risen Christ which the New Testament 
contains. Let us look at this figure which 
amazes and paralyzes the prisoner on 
Patmos. He is clothed with a garment 
which reaches down to the foot. He is 
girt about with a golden girdle. His head 
is white as white wool, white as snow, that 
is, it is perfectly white. His eyes are as a 
flame of fire. They flash and burn. His 
feet are like unto burnished brass, as if it 
had been refined in a furnace. His voice is 
all pervasive as is the voice of the ocean 
booming along the shore. In His right hand 
He holds seven stars. In His mouth He car- 
ries a two-edged sword. His face glows, 
shining as the sun shines in his strength. 
John declares that when that figure ap- 
peared before him, he fell at His feet as one 
dead. 

We are surprised that he should have 
been so solemnized. To us the figure seems 
grotesque, almost ridiculous. If we should 
see somebody with white hair carrying a 
sword in his mouth and holding seven stars 
in his hand, and walking with feet of brass, 
we should gape at him with amazed curi- 
osity or we should laugh right out. How 
could John be so profoundly impressed by 
what he saw? 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 15 

We must remember that this is a symbolic 
description of Jesus Christ and iiot a picture 
of Him. The book of the Revelation is 
symbolic and not pictorial. There are no 
pictures in it for the eye. We have dif- 
ficulty in reading the book because we 
stumble constantly over our eye. We per- 
sist in making the book a book of pictures. 
But it is not a picture book. It is a book of 
symbols. Symbols are for the reason, and 
not for the eye. An algebra, for instance, 
has no pictures in it. Many a pupil has 
wished it had. It has things in it which 
look like this : x + y^ + z^ = ( a -|- ab -|- c=')'' 
That is not for the eye, but for the mathe- 
matical understanding. Many persons like 
that sort of thing when they have the key 
which unlocks the meaning. Revelation is 
a book of symbols presented for the in- 
struction of the spiritual reason. It is the 
attributes of Jesus Christ which are being 
expressed in literary symbols, which the 
writer has culled from the literature of his 
race. He says that Christ has a robe 
reaching down to His feet. By this he tells 
us that Christ is a priest, a High Priest, a 
servant of God. The writer is a Jew who 
has become a Christian, and his mind is 
filled with the traditional conceptions of the 



l6 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

Jewish people. To a Jew the highest per- 
son on earth was the High Priest. He was 
a mediator between God and man. His 
robe symboHzed his authority and dignity. 
To John on Patmos Christ is the High 
Priest of humanity. He wears the sacer- 
dotal robe, and over the robe He wears a 
girdle. It is a golden girdle. A golden 
girdle was a feature of the dress of kings. 
John is telling us, that to him, Christ is not 
only priest, He is also king. He is priest 
of humanity, He is king of the nations. He 
wears His girdle not round His waist, but 
up under His breasts, as was the custom of 
the High Priest when he was on duty, show- 
ing that Christ is engaged in active service. 
The Christ whom John sees is working 
mightily in human history. His hair is 
white — absolutely white. He is old, very 
old, old as eternity. When Daniel described 
the " ancient of days " he gave him hair 
white as wool. John expressed in the white 
hair the eternity of Jesus. His eyes flash 
and burn like flames of fire. Fire is the 
most penetrating and searching of all the 
elements. The eyes of Christ pierce, they 
look through men, they burn their way into 
the innermost recesses of the heart. Christ 
is omniscient. His omniscience is symbol- 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 1 7 

ized by the eyes of fire. His feet look like 
brass which has been heated to a white heat 
in a furnace. Here we are told of the om- 
nipotence of Christ. His feet are hard and 
hot; they trample down all opposition; they 
scorch and shrivel into nothingness all ob- 
stacles and foes. His voice is like the 
ocean's voice, all pervading. The world is 
filled with the reverberations of what He 
says. In His hand He holds stars. The 
stars are churches. There are seven of 
them. Seven is symbolic of completeness. 
He holds all the churches in His hand. He 
holds them high above the raging flood 
which threatens to engulf them. The 
sword of Christ is His word, His message, 
His judgment. The Prophets had loved to 
say that when the Messiah came He would 
smite the nations with the word of His 
mouth. John symbolized Christ's word by 
the image of a sword. It is a two-edged 
sword. It cuts in every direction. There 
is no escape from its keen and pitiless edge. 
His face shines like the sun when the sun 
has no cloud upon it. We Americans do 
not know the sun. Sometimes in July and 
August we think we are quite well ac- 
quainted with him, but we know him only 
a little. You must go to the Orient to find 



1 8 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

what a cloudless sky is, and to feel the 
power of the sun shining in his strength. 
When the oriental sun shines in his strength, 
both man and beast wilt down before him. 
No living creature can long stand his rays. 
To gaze upon him is impossible. His glory 
immediately strikes the eye blind. John 
sees Christ in His glory. He symbolizes the 
glory by the strongest symbol the world 
affords — " the sun shining in his strength." 
" When I saw Him I fell at His feet as one 
dead." 

But Christ is not willing that His servant 
should lie on the ground paralyzed and help- 
less. He lays His right hand upon him 
saying: "Do not be afraid: I am the first 
and the last. I am the Living One. I was 
dead, and behold I am alive forevermore. 
I have the keys of death and of Hades." 
The book of the Revelation was written to 
inspire courage and endurance and hope. 
All who would go into it must pass this 
figure of Christ at the threshold. It is only 
when we see Him that we can hope to 
understand the contents of the chapters 
which follow. The prisoner on Patmos, 
when he sees Jesus Christ, working in 
human history, endows Him with all the 
attributes of God. 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 19 

During the last hundred years Jesus of 
Nazareth has been forging steadily to the 
front. Early in the nineteenth century the 
cry went forth : " Back to Jesus ! " and the 
religious world has been wondrously stirred 
and moved by that cry. It may be said to 
have been the most potent cry of all that 
wonderful century. The student of church 
history has many surprises, and one of them 
is the subordinate position which has been 
given to Jesus Christ through extended 
periods of Christian history. Through large 
parts of the Christian world, during what 
we call the middle ages, the Virgin Mary 
held the supreme place in the popular mind. 
Most of the prayers were offered to her. 
To her went out the richest love of the 
heart. Jesus was hidden behind His mother, 
and sometimes lost to view completely amid 
the vast company of the saints. The story 
told of an experience in the life of Martin 
Luther, when he was a young man, throws 
a flood of light upon the mental habits of 
the early sixteenth century. Luther had 
been brought up in a pious home. Both of 
his parents were devout. When young 
Luther, overtaken by a thunder-storm in a 
field, sees his companion struck down by 
lightning, he falls upon his knees crying in 



20 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

consternation: "Help, Saint Anna! I'll be 
a monk." He did not think of crying to 
Jesus. He cried to Jesus' grandmother. 

Even in Protestantism, Jesus has often 
been permitted to sink into the background, 
and the Gospels have been denied that 
supreme place which they claim and hold 
to-day. Luther exalted Christ, but it was 
the Christ he found in the Pauline Epistles 
rather than the Christ of the Gospels. It 
was Paul's letter to the Romans which 
opened to him the gates of Paradise, and he 
always declared that the letter to the Gala- 
tians was his wife; he loved it more than 
any other book of the New Testament. 
The English Puritans of the seventeenth 
century placed the Old Testament on a 
level with the New, and some of them lived 
more in the Pentateuch and the Psalter than 
they did in the Gospels. The heart of John 
Wesley was kindled in the eighteenth cen- 
tury not by a sentence from the Gospels, 
but by an idea in a letter of Paul. 

As an illustration of this subordination of 
the Gospels, look at the Burial Service in 
the Anglican Prayer Book. Here is a 
service to be used in the most solemn hour 
of life, when hearts are bruised and bleed- 
ing, and the sweetest words of consolation 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 21 

are needed, and to whom do the compilers 
of this service go? The service begins w^ith 
a quotation from Jesus, just one sentence, 
and passes at once to Job, and then goes to 
Job again. It then takes a chapter from the 
Psalter, and then another chapter from the 
Psalter, and not until the end do we have 
any extended passage from the New Testa- 
ment, and then it is not from the Gospels 
but from one of St. Paul's epistles. That is 
indeed a surprising fact: that Christian men 
formulating a Burial Service in the sixteenth 
century should make place in it for only one 
sentence from the lips of the Son of God. 
There is no branch of the Christian Church 
in our day which would or could form a 
service after that fashion. Jesus has come 
to the front. In our deep hours we desire 
to listen to Him. 

To-day the attention of the Christian 
world is focused on Jesus. Everything con- 
nected with His earthly life has become 
sacred to us. The whole Christian Church 
is interested in Palestine. Within the last 
fifty years that little country has been ex- 
plored as no other country has ever been 
explored in all the world. Geographers 
have mapped the courses of the streams, and 
computed the height of the hills, and 



22 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

sounded the depths of its lakes, and meas- 
ured every square mile of its surface. 
Geologists have gone under the surface, and 
have reverently studied the rock strata as 
though these too were holy. Archeologists 
have been busy with their pick and spade 
searching for fresh knowledge in the dust 
heaps and debris. Artists have travelled 
through the country painting its landscapes 
and the customs of its people. Photog- 
raphers have gone everywhere, photograph- 
ing every natural object, bringing the whole 
land close to the eye. The world is flooded 
with pictures of Palestine. Christian homes 
are not complete without pictures of the 
Mount of Olives and the Sea of Galilee. It 
is indeed a holy land, because " over its 
acres walked those blessed feet which 1,900 
years ago were nailed for our advantage to 
the bitter cross." 

Along with this labour of the explorer 
and artist there has gone forward a work 
of investigation of the words and deeds of 
Jesus. The Gospels have been made the 
supreme subject of study. They have been 
studied as no other books have ever been 
studied since men learned how to study. 
Every chapter, every verse, every word, 
every syllable has been dissected and 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 23 

analyzed, and compared, and squeezed that 
every drop of its meaning might be gotten 
out. The Gospels have been put into a 
crucible, and the crucible heated seven times 
hot, and an analysis has been conducted as 
complete and searching as any chemical 
analysis, and every ingredient, literary, his- 
torical, physical, psychical, has been labori- 
ously segregated and studied. One might 
say that the Gospels have been distilled, and 
that every globule of vapour has been put 
under the eye of the compound microscope 
of modern scientific scholarship, in order 
that nothing may escape. No other books 
in the world have been subjected to such 
long continued and pitiless scrutiny. You 
who are busy in other fields have no con- 
ception of the vast and unwearied and pains- 
taking and conscientious and fearless study 
which has been expended on these writings. 
And what is the outcome of it all? An 
augmented emphasis on the humanity of 
Jesus. The man Jesus is now vivid to every 
eye. We know Him as He lived and talked 
and worked in Palestine. We know Him 
better than the men of any preceding 
generation have ever known Him. He 
stands before us clean cut, picturesque, 
fascinating. We see Him — the Galilean 



24 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

teacher. We see Him teaching' on the side 
of the hill, on the shore of the sea, in the 
temple. We see Him, the Galilean healer, 
the great physician, who had wonderful 
power over the bodies of men. We see 
Him, the lovable and faithful friend, the 
comrade, the companion, the man who loved 
society and found supreme delight in fellow- 
ship. We see Him, the hero and martyr, 
the man who was crucified outside the wall 
of Jerusalem, and who was buried in a rich 
man's tomb. All this has been made pos- 
sible by the indefatigable labours of scholars 
within the last hundred years. 

The emphasis on the physical side of 
Jesus' life, however, has not been without 
sundry regrettable consequences. We have 
studied the man Jesus so long that we have 
become somewhat blind to His majesty. 
Familiarity has not begotten contempt, it 
could never do that, but it has taken oflf 
some of the edge of our reverence. We do 
not feel the awe which the exile on Patmos 
felt. You can see the lowered reverence in 
some of our Gospel hymns. Not a few of 
them are quite sugary. They have a deal 
to say about " dear Jesus " and " sweet 
Jesus." We have dwelt so long at the 
manger, and have made so much of Christ- 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 25 

mas poetry, and Christmas songs, and have 
so magnified the babyhood of Jesus that 
many pious persons speak of Jesus in much 
the same kind of language which a mother 
uses in speaking to her baby. The tend- 
ency comes out in other fields. There are 
travelling evangelists, some of them of 
coarse minds and vulgar tongue. Men of 
this stripe slap Jesus, as it were, on the 
shoulder, and speak to Him as though He 
were a street Arab. It is not surprising that 
a man here and there should be willing to 
indulge in such ill-mannered, shocking 
speech, but it is appalling that Christian 
people in large numbers should endure this 
form of sacrilege, even for an hour. It 
proves our spiritual degradation. It shows 
that the flame of reverence in America is 
burning low. 

For a long time we have been catering to 
the eye, and often at the expense of the 
mind. Not a few ministers, in order to 
secure a crowd, had converted public wor- 
ship into a stereopticon show, exhibiting 
pictures of Jesus and of the scenery of 
Palestine, and as soon as the moving picture 
arrived, it was pressed at once into the 
service, riveting the eye upon the surface 
aspects of Jesus' Palestinian life, and sub- 



26 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

stituting sight-seeing for thought. It would 
be fooHsh to claim that there is no place for 
the stereopticon and moving picture in re- 
ligious work. They can be made of great 
service. I simply call attention to a danger. 
The danger is that we may dwell so long 
upon the physical features of the Man of 
Galilee that we may miss the eternal 
majesty and burning glory of the Eternal 
Son of God. The Christ we worship cannot 
be thrown upon a screen. 

The effect of all this is seen in the tone 
of religious thought and feeling in multi- 
tudes of churches. The Jesus of popular 
thought is a meek and mild-eyed saint who 
was always saying gracious things and al- 
ways doing gentle deeds. He was a man 
who spoke always with the wooing note — 
indeed almost with the cooing note — and 
who was unwilling to hurt the feelings of 
anybody. He was a Palestinian idealist, 
with the soft touch of a woman ; He was a 
first century martyr, beautiful in His life 
and noble in His death. This is the only 
Jesus Christ whom many church members 
know anything about. The Christ of his- 
tory, the Christ with eyes of flame and feet 
of brass is a stranger to them. 

Because the Church has confined itself so 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 27 

largely to the picturesque aspects of the life 
of the Man of Galilee, there has been a grow- 
ing feeling in circles of educated people that 
the founder of the Christian religion has 
nothing to teach our generation. He was 
a teacher of the first century. He lived in a 
simple environment. Society had not yet 
evolved into those complex and baffling 
forms with which we are called to deal. 
He spoke to a world in its infancy. His 
message does not fit the world of our day. 
While the Christian Church served a useful 
purpose in the earlier stages of social evolu- 
tion, its usefulness has been waning, and it 
may now be regarded as an obsolescent in- 
stitution. Its great work has been done. 
Its teaching is not broad enough to cover 
the wide areas of our modern need. We 
cannot go back, men tell us, to the first 
century for instruction. The modern mind 
is impatient of the guidance of ancient 
teachers. 

If this is the feeling among large numbers 
of the intellectuals, it is also the conviction 
among multitudes of so-called practical men, 
the hard-headed men of the world, business 
men and politicians, men who have little 
time for theorizing or dreaming, but who 
must grapple with the world as it is. Jesus, 



28 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

according to many business men, is the con- 
soler. He is the man of sorrows and 
acquainted with grief. He has a heart over- 
flowing with pity, and therefore He is of 
great service to those who are poor or sick 
or lying at the gates of death. But Jesus 
has nothing to do with business. " Business 
is business," men say, with an accent that 
is final. Jesus, to be sure, insists on the 
principle of service, but what can you do 
with that in business? The principle of 
cooperation is extolled in the New Testa- 
ment, but the modern world is foundationed 
on the principle of competition, and what 
has Jesus to do with our social order? .He 
is a beautiful saint who long ago said lovely 
things, but the captains of industry and the 
kings of commerce have no use for His ex- 
hortations or laws. 

When we push our way into the political 
world, we seem to get even further away 
from the domain of this Jesus of Nazareth. 
If business is business, so is politics politics. 
A man in politics must get his candidate into 
office, and he has no time to consult Jesus 
Christ about the way in which he does it. 
The world is what it is, and men must be 
influenced as they can be and not as they 
ought to be, if the political party is to tri- 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 29 

umph. Men who are called to do the rough 
work of the world cannot allow themselves 
to be handicapped by the theories and ideals 
of a teacher who lived so long ago. This is 
the feeling that possesses the heart of the 
average politician. It does not occur to 
him that he has anything to do with Jesus 
Christ. 

When we come into the realm of world 
politics, we seem to have left Jesus com- 
pletely behind. It has been generally as- 
sumed in Christendom, as in all pagan coun- 
tries, that a nation must look out chiefly for 
itself. It must seek constantly its own 
aggrandizement. It must ever put itself 
first. This is the doctrine that is proclaimed 
boldly in all Christian countries: "America 
first " is a watchword in many American 
papers. A novelist of considerable distinc- 
tion has told us that every nation must be 
as selfish as it Can be. To be sure, Jesus 
says that not domination but service is the 
law of national life, but what does He know 
about the world in which we are now living? 
He declared that the first shall be last, and 
the last first, but that does not chill the 
ambition of any nation to push its way, at 
all hazards, into the foremost place. The 
people would immediately retire from office 



30 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

any set of officials which did not work all 
the time for the profit and prestige of their 
own country. Only a few believe that Christ 
is indeed King of Kings and Lord of Lords, 
and hence His principles have throughout 
Christian history been largely ignored if not 
cynically flouted. 

We need to come to this book of Revela- 
tion, and study carefully the Jesus Christ at 
whose feet the seer on Patmos fell. What 
a man of faith he was! He lived in a ter- 
rible time. The skies were black, and furi- 
ous storms swept and shook the world. All 
humanity lay in the evil one. Most of the 
races were either savage or barbaric. The 
Roman Empire was tyrannical and increas- 
ingly corrupt. Morality was at a low ebb. 
Everywhere vice held carnival. The appe- 
tites and passions held men in their mighty 
grip. Truth was derided and virtue laughed 
to scorn. The little congregations founded 
by the apostles of the Man of Galilee were 
struggling for their life. Their members 
were again and again hauled before 
tribunals, whipped and thrown into prison. 
Again and again they became the victims of 
cruel and fanatical mobs. They were for 
the most part obscure and uninfluential peo- 
ple. Many of them were discouraged by the 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 3 1 

awful pressure to which they were subjected. 
The Httle groups of persecuted saints were 
threatened not only by enemies without but 
by still more dangerous enemies within. 
Faith was weak, hope was darkened, love in 
many cases had grown cold. The churches 
were saturated with the spirit of the world. 
The same demons which worked destruction 
in pagan society made ravages also among 
the confessed followers of Christ. The 
scattered congregations flickered like so 
many tallow dips in the blustering and awful 
night, and it seemed sometimes as though 
the last light would be extinguished by the 
fury of the storm. But there is one man 
who is not dismayed — the exile on the isle 
of Patmos. From his prison he looks 
calmly out upon the world, and in the midst 
of the welter of confusion and chaos, he sees 
Jesus walking. He is no longer the meek 
and quiet teacher who had instructed 
peasants by the Sea of Galilee; He is now 
the august and mighty Son of God. His 
eyes are flames. His countenance shines. 
His feet burn. The sword of His authority 
cuts. He holds safe in His strong right 
hand all the churches. Ponder this stupen- 
dous act of faith. John takes the Jesus of 
Nazareth and puts Him at the center of the 



32 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

Stage of the world's history. He hfts Him 
out of Galilee, and makes the entire world 
His province. He takes a Palestinian peas- 
ant, poor and despised through His life, 
dying at last on a cross as a condemned 
criminal, and dares seat Him on the throne 
of the universe. He gives Him eyes which 
see through everything, a sword sharper 
than the sword of Domitian, and feet able 
to trample all opposition into the dust. He 
endows Him with the attributes of God. 
This is one of the sublimest acts of faith 
in the entire history of the human mind. 

You cannot prove that Jesus is King of 
Kings and Lord of Lords. There is no con- 
clusive evidence yet that every knee shall 
bow to Him. There is no overwhelming 
proof that He is to master all nations and 
races, or that He is indeed the eternal Son 
of the living God. When we exalt Jesus 
Christ to the right hand of God, we walk 
by faith and not by sight. 

When you look upon Jesus Christ, what 
do you see — a teacher, a healer, a martyr, 
only a man who is one among a company of 
heroes and saints who have brightened the 
world by their words and their deeds? If 
that is all you see, you make Christianity a 
sort of Confucianism, and Jesus is only a 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 33 

tall ethical teacher. You make the Chris- 
tian religion a sort of Buddhism, and Jesus 
is merely a sweet soul who taught gentle- 
ness and resignation. The prisoner on 
Patmos saw more than that. He saw 
Jesus Christ as Lord of all. Do you see 
Him as Lord of Lords? This is the central 
doctrine of the Christian Church. Jesus 
Christ is the Lord of history. He is the 
judge of nations and races. He walks in 
the midst of the things you see. In Him 
you behold the mind and the heart and the 
will of the Eternal. 

The war is giving us a fresh revelation of 
the majesty and power of Jesus Christ. It 
will enlarge our conception of His person. 
It will help us to transfer Him from Pales- 
tine, and give Him His place on the stage 
of the world's life. It will assist us to read 
the New Testament. Many of us have been 
reading it with one eye closed. We do not 
read the New Testament as it is written, if 
we think that Jesus always spoke words 
which were gentle, and pronounced upon all 
sorts and conditions of men indiscriminate 
benedictions. In Galilee and in Judea He 
spoke to men as a judge. Some men He 
praised, and other men He denounced. 
Some men He extolled and other men He 



34 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

lashed with the whip of His scorn. Some 
men He called hypocrites, and some men 
He called liars, and some men He called 
murderers, and some men He called fools, 
and some men He called blind, and some 
men He called serpents and vipers, and to 
some men He put the question — " How can 
you escape the condemnation of Gehenna? " 
He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for- 
ever. He is the Lord of all life. He is the 
judge of us all. We cannot escape Him. 
We are always in His presence. He goes 
through our city, and some men He calls 
hypocrites, and others liars, and others 
murderers, because they have hate in their 
heart, and others fools, and others blind 
even though they sit in high places, and are 
counted learned and clever, and others ser- 
pents and vipers because they have in their 
tongues and their hearts the poison of asps. 
To multitudes He says to-day what He said 
1,900 years ago: " How shall you escape the 
condemnation of Gehenna?" 

In Palestine He never ceased to warn. 
He told men that some of them would be 
beaten with many stripes. He said that the 
message He was announcing was a momen- 
tous message, and that those who fell on it 
would be broken to pieces, and that those 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 35 

Upon whom it should fall would be scattered 
as dust. He said that it would be better for 
some men if a millstone were hung round 
their neck and that they be hurled into the 
middle of the sea — and that to a Jew seemed 
the worst of all deaths. He said that it 
would be better for some men if they had 
never been born. He said that there are 
sins for which there is no forgiveness, either 
in this world or in the next. Time and 
again He closed His discourses with a 
reference to the outer darkness and the 
gnashing of teeth. He made it clear as 
language could make it that there is no 
peace for the wrong-doer until he gives up 
his wrong-doing, and that the penalty for 
persistent trampling on God's law is terrible 
beyond the picturing power of human 
speech. And what He said, He says. He 
says to-day and every day to all trans- 
gressors: "Unless you repent, you shall all 
perish." He warns men who do wrong of 
a wrath to come. 

He told men that after His death He was 
coming again. He said He would come 
while some of those who listened to Him 
were still alive. He said He would come 
when the world was in a frightful condition, 
men suffering a tribulation such as mankind 



36 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

had never known before. And He kept His 
word. He always fulfills His promises. He 
said He would come on the clouds of heaven. 
Some of us make sad work of the New 
Testament when we come to interpret its 
figurative expressions. We are occidentals, 
and we are stupid and clumsy in our inter- 
pretation of oriental metaphors. We often 
miss the meaning of an important sentence 
because of our wooden literalism. When 
the Hebrew prophet foretold a time when 
the sun would be turned into darkness and 
the moon into blood, he was not thinking of 
the sun which astronomers study or the 
moon under which lovers walk. He was 
thinking of social commotions, and political 
disasters which were certain to devastate 
and frighten the world. The sun is turned 
into darkness when the light in men's hearts 
goes out, and the moon is turned into blood 
when carnage reddens the earth. The 
material universe reflects the disturbed con- 
dition of men's minds and hearts. The 
ancient prophets were not interested in the 
physical heavens. When our Lord said that 
He was coming in the clouds of heaven, He 
made use of a figure which had long been 
common on the pens of apocalyptic writers. 
He did not mean to say that He was coming 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 37 

on rolling masses of aqueous vapour. 
What He meant was that He would come 
in stormy times, in vast social upheavals 
and commotions, in mighty reformations 
and revolutions, in political convulsions and 
national tragedies; and so He has often 
come. He came in the destruction of Jeru- 
salem, when the temple disappeared in 
smoke, and when the bodies of the slaugh- 
tered dead were piled in sickening heaps 
around the demolished city walls. His 
words were literally fulfilled. Not one stone 
was left standing on another. He came 
again in the downfall of the Roman Empire. 
He sat as Judge, and the mighty Empire of 
the Caesars passed away. It was He who 
said: " Depart, ye cursed," He came again 
in the French Revolution. For generations 
the lords and nobles of France had trodden 
the common people under their feet, and at 
last the Lord of Lords ascended the throne, 
and the old regime, which had made it hard 
for men to live, came down in blood and 
ashes. The other day He came again in the 
collapse of the Russian Empire. For many 
a year Russia has had one of the rottenest 
of all the governments which ever disgraced 
the earth. Her history has been a long 
drawn tragedy. And now the King of Kings 



38 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

has come, and the Russian Empire is no 
more. You could have heard, if you had 
had ears to hear, the hiss of Christ's awful 
sentence: " Depart ye cursed." 

Look out upon Europe to-day, and what 
do you see? Can you not see that this is a 
Judgment Day, and that all of the nations 
have been summoned to stand before 
Christ? Do you not see that He has re- 
vealed Himself again as the Lord of Lords, 
and that He has cast the nations into hell? 

The feeling that has come to us most 
frequently within the last four years is a 
feeling of helplessness. We are simply 
swept along by forces which we cannot 
control. We are held in the grip of some- 
body from whom there is no escape. We 
are helpless as individuals, as institutions 
and as nations. There is no power on earth 
to save. No one could stop the war after it 
had once begun. Finance could not stop it. 
Clever men had long assured us that bankers 
could prevent a war. " Money talks," men 
said, " and when money cries — Halt ! — a war 
will stop!" But the voice of money was 
completely drowned by the boom of the 
guns. Commerce, it was claimed, would 
never allow such a war as this. War upsets 
commerce, and throws the business world 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 39 

into chaos — but commerce was not heeded 
when this war began. Education was also 
helpless. She had renowned faculties of 
learned men. She held in her hand the 
garnered wisdom of the ages, but she was 
impotent in the hour of the world's greatest 
need. Art also was helpless. She knew 
what lay in the future. She recognized that 
paintings would be burned, and that cathe- 
drals would be shattered, and that priceless 
treasures of many kinds, immortal creations 
of the human spirit, would all be devoured 
by this monster of war, but Art could do 
nothing. International Law was as im- 
potent as Art. For a century the noblest 
men in the world had laboured in the con- 
struction of safeguards against war. There 
had been Hague Conferences, and arbitra- 
tion treaties, and arbitral courts. There 
stood in the capital of Holland a beautiful 
Palace of Peace. Its gates were wide open, 
but no one could be induced to enter. There 
was no power to coerce the nations to make 
use of the machinery which peace-lovers had 
laboriously constructed. Socialism had been 
looked upon by many as an unconquerable 
defender of peace, but socialism went down 
in the surging war flood. The Church of 
Christ, pledged to the Gospel of Justice and 



40 'OLD TRUTHS ^AND NEW FACTS 

Love, was as helpless as all the other institu- 
tions. There was none mighty to save — no, 
not one. Reason was impotent, conscience 
was helpless, the heart could do nothing. 
There was nothing which could save Europe 
from slipping down into the arena of blood. 
Have you asked yourself why? It may be 
that the Judge has taken the world into His 
hands. It may be that Christ has come to 
pass judgment. The war began with three 
nations involved: Germany and Austria and 
Russia. But other nations began to slide 
in. One after another slipped down into the 
abyss of tears and woe, until there were six, 
and then ten, and then twelve, and then 
fifteen, and then twenty, and now there are 
twenty-three. What a spectacle that is — 
the like of it has never been seen since the 
world began — twenty-three nations, one 
after the other sinking down into this fire, 
every one of them protesting that it did not 
want to go in, all of them with one accord 
declaring that it could not possibly stay out. 
Have you any explanation for that? Does 
it not look as though we might have fallen 
into the hands of the King of Kings? 

We have heard constant talk about 
stopping the war. Men speak glibly of this 
as though it might be stopped almost any 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 41 

day if a few resolute men would set about it. 
Now and then, somebody suggests that we 
all get together and pray — this would 
speedily bring the war to an end. Some- 
body else suggests that a Conference be held 
in Sweden or somewhere else, for the pur- 
pose of framing a resolution that the 
tragedy has continued long enough. Has it 
ever occurred to you that possibly you 
cannot stop it, that nobody can stop it? 
After it started no one was able to prevent 
twenty other nations from going in, and 
why should you think that any one should 
now be able to put the fire out? Suppose 
that this is Gehenna fire, the fire of which 
Jesus spoke, the unquenchable fire which is 
to burn up the chaff, the fire of which John 
the Baptist spoke, and that it must burn on 
and on until it has done its perfect work? 
When you set a city on fire, you cannot ex- 
tinguish the flames by the clock, and when 
you get twenty-three nations engaged in a 
life and death struggle, you cannot induce 
them to lay down their arms when you 
think they have fought long enough. The 
fire will burn on until the wood and the hay 
and the stubble have been consumed, and 
there remains of our world only the silver 
and gold and precious stones. 



42 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

Our civilization has been judged. It has 
been weighed in the balance and found 
wanting. We have been proud of it, and 
gloated over it, but it has been an abomina-' 
tion to Jesus Christ. It has been a mili- 
taristic civilization. All the Christian na- 
tions have been armed to the teeth. They 
have beaten the implements of industry into 
swords. They have squandered the taxes 
wrung from peasants' blood upon the para- 
phernalia of battle. They have squandered 
the precious years of their young men in 
military drill, perfecting them in the hellish 
art of ripping open human abdomens with 
sharpened steel. Do you wonder that the 
God of love has said: " Away with it! " It 
is amazing He should have borne with it so 
long. 

Ours is a capitalistic civilization. The 
production of wealth and not the production 
of men has been our cardinal aim. Our 
business world has been founded not on 
cooperation for service, but competition for 
private profit. Bitter rivalry, and not fra- 
ternity, has been the outstanding feature of 
the Christian world. Under this capitalistic 
system nine-tenths of all the wealth of the 
leading nations have gotten into the hands 
of one-tenth of the population. A few men 



THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS CHRIST 43 

have lived in palaces, and hundreds of thou- 
sands of God's children, brothers and sisters 
of Jesus Christ, have been packed away like 
puppies and pigs in foul and darksome rook- 
eries and hovels, and the brotherly heart of 
the Son of God has blazed out against it all. 
It may be that before the war is ended our 
whole social order will go up in smoke. It 
may be that our civilization is doomed, and 
that we stand at the threshold of a new dis- 
pensation in the evolution of mankind! If 
our civilization is on its death-bed, still must 
we say as one said of old : " The judgments 
of the Lord are true and righteous alto- 
gether." 

Lift up your eyes and look! Do you not 
see Him? You are blind if you do not see 
Him! He has come. He is here. His 
eyes are flame. His feet are brass. He is 
trampling into nothingness the things which 
obstruct His purposes. He is fulfilling the 
second Psalm. He is breaking the nations 
with a rod of iron; He is dashing them in 
pieces like a potter's vessel. He is walking 
in the midst of the things you see. He is 
proclaiming Himself the Lord of Lords and 
the King of Kings. Listen and you will hear 
Him saying: "I am the first and the last, 
the Living One. I was dead, and I am alive 



44 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

forevermore. I have the keys of death and 
of Hades." 

He who reads the history of this world 
must exclaim with Paul: "Behold then the 
goodness and severity of God: toward them 
that fell severity; but toward thee goodness, 
if thou continue in his goodness : otherwise 
thou also shalt be cut off." Unless one is 
in harmony with His purposes, it is indeed 
an awful thing to fall into the hands of the 
living God! God so loved the world that 
He gave His only begotten Son. The Son 
is the Lord of Lords and King of Kings. 
And when I saw Him I fell at His feet awe- 
struck and overwhelmed. 

What, then, is the modification which we 
may reasonably expect in our conception of 
Jesus Christ? A shifting of the emphasis, 
I think, from His humanity to His divinity; 
a less exaggerated estimate of His gentle- 
ness and meekness, and a fuller recognition 
of His majesty, severity, and power. 



LECTURE II 

THE APPRECIATION OF 
VICARIOUS SUFFERING 



LECTURE II 

THE APPRECIATION OF VICARIOUS 
SUFFERING 

BY vicarious suffering is meant the 
suffering which one person under- 
goes for another. The principle of 
vicarious suffering Hes at the heart of the 
Christian rehgion. " Christ died for our 
sins, according to the Scriptures," so says 
Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. 
" One died for all," so he says in the second 
letter to the same church. " While we 
were yet weak, in due season Christ died for 
the ungodly. While we were yet sinners 
Christ died for us," so he says in his letter to 
the Romans. " Christ suffered for sins once, 
the righteous for the unrighteous, that he 
might bring us to God," so says Peter, and 
he also puts it in this way: "He himself 
bore our sins in his body on the tree." John 
phrases it thus : " The blood of Jesus his son, 
cleanseth us from all sin." " He is the pro- 
pitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, 
but also for the whole world." 
47 



48 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

Why did the apostles teach this? It was 
because their Master taught it. Here are 
Jesus' words: " The son of man came not to 
be ministered unto but to minister, and to 
give his Hfe a ransom for many." " I am 
the good shepherd, and I lay down my life 
for the sheep." " Greater love hath no man 
than this, that a man lay down his life for 
his friends." It was this fact above all 
others which Christ desired His disciples to 
remember. On the night on which He was 
betrayed, He took bread and brake it and 
gave to them saying: "This is my body 
which is given for you," and the cup in like 
manner, saying: "This cup is the new 
covenant in my blood even that which is 
poured out for you." The greatest of the 
early Christian preachers declared that it 
was his purpose to know nothing but Jesus 
Christ and Him crucified. Wherever the 
Christian religion has gone, it has gone as 
the religion of the cross. IMillions of 
tongues around the world keep on singing: 

" In the cross of Christ I glory, 

Tow'ring o'er the wrecks of time ; 
All the light of sacred story 
Gathers round its head sublime." 

The doctrine of vicarious suffering is 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 49 

fundamental in our religion; and no doctrine 
has been so frequently attacked, and so 
violently repudiated as this one. The oppo- 
sition began at once, and has continued to 
the present hour. Paul found the cross to 
be obnoxious to both sections of the world 
of his day. To the Jews it was a stumbling 
block, and to Gentiles it was foolishness. 
The Greeks laughed at it as something 
ridiculous, and the Jews, while facing it seri- 
ously, had infinite difficulty in reconciling it 
with their idea of God. The same attitudes 
of mind are still with us. Some men con- 
sider the doctrine of the vicarious suffering 
of Jesus as something too preposterous to be 
investigated, and others, finding that it is 
taught clearly and emphatically in the Scrip- 
tures, regretfully discard it or finally accept 
it with reluctance and misgivings. Men are 
pondering to-day the questions which have 
vexed them for two thousand years: Why 
should one man suffer for another? How 
can suffering and death save us? How can 
the suffering and death of one man affect the 
sins of others? 

In their impatience with what they call 
theological notions, many men have tossed 
aside the Christian doctrine of the atone- 
ment as something incredible, going so far 



50 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

as to deny the fact of vicarious suffering 
altogether. The great war is teaching us 
many things. It is forcing upon us facts 
which we have ignored completely or 
greatly minimized. One of the colossal 
facts being burned into the consciousness of 
the entire race is the fact of vicarious suffer- 
ing. It has always been conceded that the 
innocent suffer with the guilty, and it is 
becoming equally clear that the innocent 
often suffer for the guilty, and it is dawn- 
ing for the first time upon many minds that 
it is only by the suffering of the innocent 
that the world can be saved. The war is 
exerting a tremendous pressure against 
rooted prejudices which have caused multi- 
tudes to hold aloof from the Christian 
Church. It is a huge torch which is throw- 
ing a flood of light on the fundamental prin- 
ciples of human life. It is a vast conflagra- 
tion in whose fierce heat many a doubt will 
forever disappear. 

It must be admitted that not a little of the 
opposition to the doctrine of vicarious suffer- 
ing has been due to the clumsy and un- 
fortunate forms in which that doctrine has 
frequently been presented. The analogies 
have often been far fetched, and the illus- 
trations have sometimes been repellent and 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 5 1 

misleading. This is to be regretted, but is 
scarcely to be wondered at. Great spiritual 
truths are not easily expressed in human 
speech. Language cracks and breaks when 
we try to force into it celestial meanings. 
The death of Jesus on the cross is a vast 
mystery. No man would venture to assert 
that he has seen to the bottom of it, or is 
able to take in its immeasurable and awful 
content. Peter in speaking of the sufferings 
of Christ says that angels desire to look into 
them, and intimates that even they are un- 
able to pierce their fathomless depths. 
Many of the illustrations used by Christian 
teachers have been crude and revolting, and 
some of the arguments have been faulty and 
unconvincing; but the fact that Jesus, an 
innocent man, died an agonizing death upon 
the cross, is one of the best attested facts in 
history, and so long as the human mind has 
sufificient vitality to grapple with great prob- 
lems, it will be unable to leave this problem 
alone. Different interpretations have been 
offered, and still others will be forthcoming 
through the ages. Theories are intellectual 
statements devised to interpret facts, and 
the growing mind becomes dissatisfied with 
statements which were counted adequate in 
the earlier stages of its development. Cer- 



52 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

tain doctrines of the atonement have long 
since become obsolete, others are obsoles- 
cent. It would not be going too far to say 
that no doctrine of the atonement is final. 
Two clear facts, however, stand out before 
us : Jesus died upon the cross. He did not 
die for Himself, He died for others. The fact 
that He died for others gives His death a 
piercing and overwhelming power. The 
death of guilty men does not profoundly 
impress us. It gives the heart a certain 
measure of relief. It seems just that a 
criminal shall die for his crimes, that a 
vicious man shall perish because of his sins, 
but when an innocent man dies for others, 
our spirit is purified and exalted, and the 
heart looks on with an indescribable and 
transfiguring awe. 

The suffering and death of Jesus have 
been too often separated from ordinary 
human life, and studied in isolation as 
though they were something solitary and 
unique. We understand them best when 
we see in them the illustration of a principle 
which has been working in humanity from 
the beginning, and the climax of a tragedy 
as old as the world. The world has always 
been full of vicarious suffering. Everything 
good has been bought by a price. The 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 53 

world has never gotten on save by the sacri- 
fice of the lovers of progress. It is only be- 
cause the innocent have suffered for the 
guilty and the strong have sacrificed them- 
selves for the weak, and the righteous have 
borne the burden of the wicked that civiliza- 
tion has become possible. The world has 
many kinds of suffering, but no form of it 
is so divine or so impressive as vicarious 
suffering. The brightest page in the Hfe of 
any community is the page which tells the 
story of how men and women have suffered 
for others. The heroes and heroines of the 
world are those who suffer vicariously. The 
man who rescues a boy from drowning at 
the expense of his own life; the man who 
carries a baby out of the top story of a 
burning building at the cost of burns which 
leave him scarred for life; the man who in 
railroad wreck or in shipwreck beats back 
death from others by offering up his own 
life, these are the men before whom we all 
bow down. We not only believe in vicari- 
ous suffering, we glory in it, and we know 
that without it the world would be shabby 
and mean. It is only because parents are 
willing to sacrifice for their children, and 
teachers are willing to bear the ignorance of 
their pupils, and philanthropists are willing 



54 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

to be patient with the ingratitude of the 
people they endeavour to help, and re- 
formers are willing to endure misrepresenta- 
tion and calumny and hatred of the world 
they are trying to make better, and patriots 
are willing to lay down their lives for their 
country, and God-fearing men and women 
are willing to grieve over the sins of the 
fallen, and give themselves to those who 
have wandered from the way, that humanity 
makes progress, and hope has any chance 
to live. 

When some one, therefore, asks the ques- 
tion why should one man suffer for another? 
the reply is that it is only by such suffering 
that the world can get on. It is only by 
that kind of suffering that any one of us 
has been able to arrive at the point where 
we are. It is only by men suffering for 
others that life in any community is ren- 
dered tolerable. It was only by vicarious 
suffering that this nation came to be, and it 
was by the same sort of suffering that the 
nation was saved. No demons which afflict 
our world can ever be cast out except by the 
self-sacrificial efforts of men' who love 
righteousness more than comfort or ease. 
You cannot overthrow the saloon without 
the patient and persistent and heroic efforts 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 55 

of multitudes of workers who are willing to 
spend and be spent in the noble cause. You 
cannot save the young men and the young 
women of our great cities from moral 
degradation without the efforts of anxious 
minds and suffering hearts. Nor can you 
deliver mankind to-day from the tyranny of 
Prussian diabolism except by the bloody 
sweat of innocent men. 

It is vicarious suffering which the war is 
forcing on our attention. We are not aston- 
ished by the suffering of the guilty; it is the 
suffering of the innocent which attracts and 
holds us. It has been often said that this 
war is retribution, the penalty which has 
come upon the world because of its trans- 
gressions. This is true. But not all the 
suffering of this war is punitive. Most of 
it is vicarious. It is not the guilty but the 
innocent who are suffering most. Take, for 
instance, the suffering nations. Can you 
measure their moral desert by the magni- 
tude of their woe? You may say that 
Russia is suffering for her sins, and that 
Great Britain and France are also in part 
responsible for the conditions out of which 
the present war emerged: but how about 
Belgium and Poland and Armenia? These 
are the most bruised and bleeding of all the 



56 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

lands, and certainly these three were not 
responsible for this war. These three peo- 
ples so far as causing the war is concerned 
are guiltless, and yet they are suffering 
most. We are all agreed that Germany is 

>^ most responsible for the precipitation of the 
war. Her military masters willed it, as 
Maximilian Harden long ago admitted. Her 
diplomats led her into it, as her ambassador 

,^ to Great Britain, Prince Lichnowsky, can- 
didly confesses in his famous memorandum. 
History will have no difficulty in fastening 
the guilt of this war on Germany. She 
stands condemned not only before this 
generation, but before all the generations 
that shall ever be. Great Neptune's ocean 
will never wash this blood clean from her 
hand. And yet, up to the present hour, she 
has suffered in many ways less than Serbia, 
Poland, France, and Belgium. She has 
looted every nation upon which she has 
planted her brutal feet, and what could not 
be carried off she has committed to the 
flames. The arch-culprit in this awful 
tragedy seems to be escaping the frightful 
retribution she deserves. 

When you consider classes of men, which 
classes are suffering most in all of the bel- 
ligerent countries? Surely not the ruling 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 57 

classes, and not the classes most directly- 
responsible for the war. There are not over 
a hundred men in Europe who can be said 
to have made this war inevitable. If the 
men responsible for it could be seized, court 
martialed, shot in some public square in full 
view of the onlooking world, the human 
heart would give a sigh of relief. One could 
then more readily believe that there is such 
a thing as justice still potent in the world. 
But these men have not been shot, nor are 
they likely to be shot. The men who have 
been shot, who are being shot, and who will 
continue to be shot had nothing whatever 
to do with the bringing on of this war. It 
is a slaughter of the innocents. 

Take, for instance, the little children, the 
babies in their cradles, and the boys and 
girls at school. IMany of them have been 
blown to pieces by bombs dropped from 
aeroplanes. They were as innocent of all 
wrong as are the angels, and yet they have 
perished miserably. 

Next to the children come the women. 
What a vast host they are ! Mothers, wives, 
sisters, daughters, sweethearts! Not one of 
them responsible for the waging of this war, 
as free from guilt as though they had lived 
on some other planet, and yet they are 



58 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

suffering as much as the men — yea — more 
than the men. The women have not been 
voters in Europe. They have not conceived 
the poHtical poHcies, nor made out the state 
programs. They had nothing to do with 
the precipitation of this catastrophe. They 
are absohitcly innocent of the gigantic 
crime, but oh, their suffering! They are 
suffering vicariously. They are suffering 
for others. They are suffering in the place 
of others. 

When you pass into the trenches, you are 
still in the company of the innocent. These 
soldiers are all young men. They had 
nothing to do with this war. They did not 
create the forces which caused it. They 
did not frame the legislation which made it 
possible. Their advice was not asked in 
any country. Like sheep they have been 
driven to the slaughter. Men over fifty 
brought the world into such a condition that 
millions of men under thirty have been 
obliged to die. Far behind the guns there 
are men between sixty and seventy-five 
years of age who map out the campaign and 
determine when and where the attack is to 
be made, but it is the youth who do the 
dying. We read about a great drive. It is 
a drive in more senses than one. Some- 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 59 

times it is the slaughter of a lot of school- 
boys driven from their mothers to the field 
of blood by their superiors. This is one of 
the outstanding features of war : the young 
men die for the old men and in place of 
them. 

Science has increased the magnitude of 
vicarious sufYering. War has always been 
full of it, for war from the beginning has 
meant the killing of men, and men cannot 
be killed without the wounding of the hearts 
of women. But modern warfare has im- 
measurably increased the suffering of the 
innocent. It is singular that all of the 
modern instruments of war are blind. A 
howitzer cannot see even twenty miles, 
much less can it see at a distance of eighty 
miles. The submarine cannot see. It can- 
not discriminate between belligerent and 
non-belligerent on the high seas. The aero- 
plane is blind. It cannot see the difference 
between a hospital and an arsenal at the 
height of two miles. An asphyxiating gas 
is as blind as Samson in the mill at Gaza. 
Science has put out the eyes of war; and 
its eyes being out, war is more cruel than 
ever. In olden times an effort was made to 
spare the innocent. They can be spared no 
longer. The innocent and the guilty must 



6o OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

perish together. In olden times it was 
only a small fraction of the nation which 
fought. It is now necessary that the entire 
nation shall be mobilized. Victory depends 
as much upon the men and women behind 
the lines as upon the men in the trenches, 
and therefore the burdens of war fall upon 
all. It is upon the innocent poor that they 
fall with crushing force. Poverty is dismal 
in peace, but in war time it is fatal. We 
shall never know the tens of thousands of 
human beings which this war starved to 
death. Old men who had served God 
through a long life, and aged women who 
had counted it their joy to help others, have 
been left in many lands to perish, with no 
one able to offer relief. It is when one 
thinks of the immeasurable suffering and 
woe of the innocent that the war takes on a 
fresh horror, and solemnizes the heart won- 
derfully. What does all this mean? Why 
is this permitted? Does it happen by 
chance or does it come to pass by the per- 
mission of an all-wise and all-loving God? 
Can this be a feature of His plan? Is this 
one of the ways in which He works? Is 
there a force in vicarious suffering which 
has a peculiar and an indispensable efficacy? 
Is suffering for others a principle deep- 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING" 6 1 

rooted in the constitution of the universe, 
one which cannot be torn out, and which 
can no more be changed than the character 
and purpose of God? 

We must seek an answer for these ques- 
tions at the foot of the cross of Christ. 
Why did Jesus die? Was His death an 
accident? Was it one of those chance, dark 
happenings of which there seem to be so 
many in this bewildering world? Was it 
due to the fact that Caiaphas happened to 
be High Priest, and Pontius Pilate chanced 
to be Roman Procurator of Judea, and that 
Jesus happened to speak a few phrases 
which the crowd happened to be in the mood 
to resent and distort? In the whirling of 
the wheel of circumstances, did Golgotha 
happen to drop out? In the turning of the 
big world kaleidoscope did this black bead 
smeared with blood suddenly and by chance 
appear? That is a conceivable explanation, 
but it will never permanently satisfy the 
human mind. The only interpretation 
which has in it an abiding satisfaction is that 
which the apostles accepted two thousand 
years ago, namely, that the death of Jesus 
fell in with heaven's plan, and that it for- 
warded God's purposes for mankind. In the 
words of Peter in the first recorded apostolic 



'62 "OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

sermon : " Him being delivered up by the 
determinate counsel and foreknowledge of 
God, ye did crucify and slay, whom God 
raised up, having loosed the pangs of death: 
because it was not possible that he should 
be holden of it." God is not then absent or 
asleep when Jesus dies upon the cross. He 
knows what is going on. Jesus is not left 
to die by chance nor in vain. The world 
being what it is, it becomes necessary for 
the son of God to die. Men being what 
they are, the death of Christ becomes in- 
evitable. Without His death the power of 
sin cannot be broken. 

If this be true, then may it not be true 
that the bulk of the suffering of this present 
time is sacrificial, and is it too much to hope 
that it is working out an exceeding weight 
of glory? Is not the world's experience 
to-day related to the experience of Jesus on 
the cross? Are not men to-day drinking of 
the cup of which He drank? Is not the law 
which was fulfilled in His passion receiving 
a fresh fulfillment in the sufferings of a vast 
multitude which no man can number? 

Many men are finding to-day their sweet- 
est consolation in this thought. A dis- 
tinguished professor of Oxford University 
has told us how day by day he is haunted by 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING' 63 

the thought that men are dying for him, 
young men, noble men, men whom he knows 
and loves are laying down their lives that 
he and his fellow countrymen may be free. 
It solemnizes him and gives him a new in- 
sight into the mystery and glory of life. A 
writer has told us how, in walking along the 
roads of Northern France, he has been com- 
forted by the crucifixes he has passed on the 
way. These crucifixes are symbols of the 
suffering of Jesus, and the sight of them has 
braced the man's heart and soothed his 
spirit as nothing else has been able to do. 
In the midst of so much pain and woe it has 
comforted him to remember that Christ also 
suffered, and that somehow the same great 
laws and forces which worked in the death 
of Jesus are also to-day working out divine 
ends in the sufferings and death of all these 
men. 

If you ask why the just must suffer for 
the unjust, the innocent for the guilty, the 
fit for the unfit, there is probably no better 
answer than, " It is the way of love." Why, 
for instance, does a mother suffer for a way- 
ward son? He has chosen the broad way 
which leads to death. He is going down to 
perdition before her eyes. She follows him 
day and night with her love and prayers. 



64 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

She sufifers more than words can tell. The 
whitening hair and the deepening lines in 
the face, and above all the pathetic sadness 
in the eyes, tell a little of the tragic story. 
She suffers more than he does. To an on- 
looker he does not seem to suffer at all. 
His laugh is loud, and through the days and 
nights he eats and drinks and makes merry. 
He the guilty one does not worry. He 
the sinner feels slight compunction. His 
mother is a woman of sorrow and acquainted 
with grief. She is innocent, but she bleeds. 
She is guiltless, but she suffers. In all her 
son's degradation she is afflicted. His 
transgressions she carries on her heart. 
For him she wrestles in the garden of Geth- 
semane. For him she hangs on a cross. 
This is a piece of life, authenticated and in- 
controvertible. This tragedy has taken 
place in every land and in every time. How 
will you account for her sufferings? Why 
does she suffer? Try for a moment to make 
use of some of the theories which have been 
used in the realm of theology to explain the 
sufferings of Jesus. Try the ransom theory, 
and say that she suffers in order to pay a 
ransom to the devil that he may set her son 
free. How fantastic that sounds ! Try the 
theory of Anselm. Say that her son has in- 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 65 

curred an enormous debt and that only by 
her tears can this debt be Hquidated. How 
mechanical, how hollow! Try the govern- 
mental theory. Say that the laws of justice 
have been transgressed, the government of 
God has been insulted, and that in order to 
vindicate the principle of righteousness it is 
necessary that the mother shall go down 
weeping to her grave. How incredible! 
Try the moral influence theory. Say that 
she weeps in order to influence her son. 
She puts on her sad face to show him how 
badly she feels. She makes an exhibition 
of her grief for the impression she hopes to 
make on him. But here again we are in 
the realm of the external and the mechan- 
ical and the theatrical. Tears shed for a 
purpose are not tears at all. Such tears are 
drops of water squeezed out of certain ducts 
for the securing of desired ends. Tears are 
words of the heart. Tears have blood in 
them. Tears are never shed for effect. 
They cannot be. They are inevitable. No 
power on earth or in heaven can hold them 
back. Talk to a mother about the ransom, 
or debt, or governmental, or moral influence 
theory as an explanation for her agony of 
heart, and she will gaze at you in amaze- 
ment. You speak a language which she 



66 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW^ FACTS 

does not understand. Ask her why she 
suffers so because of the sins of her son, and 
she has one answer only — " Why ! I am his 
mother!" That is the sole and sufhcient 
answer. She suffers because she cannot 
help it. She cannot help it because she 
loves him. It is the nature of love to suffer. 
Love always suffers. Love would cease to 
be love if love should lose the power of 
suffering. Love and suffering always go 
together. You cannot have the first with- 
out the second. The deeper the love the 
greater is its capacity for suffering. The 
greatest lovers suffer most. Sympathy is a 
form of love. By sympathy we enter into 
the experiences of another. If the experi- 
ences of that other are sad and bitter, then 
our sympathy brings us pain. You cannot 
sympathize with the bereaved without bear- 
ing their grief, nor can you sympathize with 
the degraded without bearing their sins. 

Here then we find at least a partial ex- 
planation of the sufferings and death of 
Jesus. He was a lover. He loved men. 
Loving them, He sympathized with them. 
He could not look upon them without feel- 
ing compassion. His heart was torn by the 
sight of their helplessness and misery. He 
was so sensitive to human need that His 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 67 

soul went out spontaneously to meet it. 
He responded so quickly to the tragedy of 
human life that He became at once a man 
of sorrows. Love rejoices when it is re- 
ceived; love is pierced when it is rejected. 
Slighted love is a love which bleeds. Jesus' 
love was slighted, scorned, rejected. He 
came unto His own, but His own received 
Him not. He was caricatured and hooted 
at by His enemies, He was misunderstood 
and disappointed by His friends. He trod 
the wine-press alone. At the crisis of life 
all forsook Him and fled. He braced His 
heroic soul by the thought, " I am not alone, 
my Father is with me." In a world like 
this you cannot have a perfect man who is 
not also a suffering man. On a planet so 
weighted down with sin and woe, an ideal 
man must of necessity be acquainted with 
grief. Jesus suffered because He loved. 
Jesus died because He loved to the end. 

But we cannot stop at the cross outside 
the wall of Jerusalem. That cross has a 
cosmic significance. It is a window opening 
out on the infinite. Through the tragedy 
on Golgotha, we pass into a deeper appre- 
hension of the character of God. Jesus 
claimed to be the eternal Son of the living 
God. He said that nobody understands the 



68 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

Father except the Son, and those souls to 
whom the Son makes a revelation of Him. 
He asserted that he who has seen the Son 
has seen the Father, and that the Son and 
the Father are one. Jesus dies on the cross 
then because God loves. God so loved the 
world that He gave His Son. No father 
gives up his son to death without grief. God 
is, therefore, a sufifering God. Unlike the 
serene and indififerent gods of the Pagan 
world, the God of Christianity is a God who 
sympathizes with men. In all their afflic- 
tions He is afflicted. He carries their woes 
on His infinite heart. He grieves over their 
blunders and transgressions, and bears daily 
the unimaginable weight of their sorrows. 
This is a truth to ponder in these 
shadowed days. Multitudes of hearts are 
sorely troubled. The human spirit is in 
every land wounded and depressed. The 
best men are staggering under the weight 
of all this weary and unintelligible world. 
The human mind is bewildered. The 
human heart is lacerated. There are those 
who can with difficulty work, and it is not 
easy for them to sleep. It is the noblest 
spirits who are most depressed, it is the 
most sensitive souls who suffer most. 
Where shall we obtain relief? In the 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 69 

thought that the Eternal suffers with us. 
We could not suffer so if God were not a 
suffering God. We suffer because He made 
us in His image. Our heart is something 
like His own. If we being hardened by 
evil, and rendered more or less callous by 
long continued transgressions, are able to 
enter into the agony of the world, how much 
more fully must the infinitely sensitive God 
enter into all that mankind to-day suffers. 
A God indifferent to the cries of a world in 
distress can be to us no God at all. A God 
incapable of feeling compassion on the 
multitudes of sorrowing mothers, and the 
vast companies of orphaned boys and girls, 
could evoke no response in our hearts. It 
is only a God who carries on His heart the 
sins and sorrows of all His children, and 
who is entering into all the torture and 
anguish of these awful times, who can re- 
tain a place in our affections, or put forth 
any claim upon our obedience. We can 
worship only a God who suffers for others. 
It is the inexorable demand of our heart 
that the God of the universe shall carry a 
cross! The Christian religion meets this 
instinctive cry of our souls with the assur- 
ance that the tragedy on Golgotha was not 
an incident closed nineteen hundred years 



70 OLD TRUTHS 'AND NEW FACTS' 

ago, but a process which runs on through 
the ages. The lamb was not slain in a 
certain month of a particular year in the 
reign of Tiberius Caesar. The lamb was 
slain from the foundation of the world. God 
has carried a wound in His heart from the 
day on which sin worked its first havoc. It 
is only because He carries our sins that we 
have hope of final deliverance from them. 
If He were indifferent to suffering and sin, 
we should be without hope in the world. 
There is no hymn more appropriate for a 
world in darkness than 

" When I survey the wondrous cross, 
On which the Prince of Glory died." 

When, therefore, men hereafter sneer at 
the doctrine of vicarious suffering as a piece 
of savage superstition, a remnant of primi- 
tive Jewish thinking which the world has 
carried far too long, let us ask them to open 
history and find out for themselves if it is 
not true that without the shedding of blood 
there is no remission of sins. Count up the 
evils from which the world has been de- 
livered, the vipers which the race has shaken 
from its hand, the demons which have been 
exorcised, and see if in a solitary instance 
the price demanded has not been the 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 7 1 

shedding of blood. The bloody Roman 
gladiatorial games did not vanish until some 
one was willing to die. Slavery would not 
go until many had died. Superstitions in 
heathen lands have been overthrown only 
by the bloody sweat of missionaries. Cruel 
diseases have been conquered only because 
physicians have been willing to lay down 
their lives in making experiments in search 
of a remedy. New continents have been 
torn from the grip of savages and opened 
up to civilization only by pioneers who 
reckoned their lives of small account. We 
march on to victory only over the graves of 
the heroes and heroines who have gone 
before us. 

We are once more face to face with the 
thrilling and solemnizing fact that without 
the shedding of blood there can be no 
redemption. The world has long staggered 
under the accumulated weight of an armed 
peace. The policy of armed peace was the 
product of a philosophy the fundamental as- 
sumption of which is that war is a good 
thing, a cardinal feature in the curriculum 
prescribed by the Almighty for the educa- 
tion of nations. War is a needed tonic, men 
said, war is essential for the maintenance of 
moral and physical virility, it is only by war 



72 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

that nations can keep their fighting edge. 
This was the talk not only in one country 
but in all countries. This was the philosophy 
of larger or smaller groups in every Chris- 
tian land. Men persisted in talking about 
the glory of war, and continued to throw 
round its bloody shoulders shining garments 
woven in the loom of the imagination. 

But war has been the supreme scourge of 
the race. Its havoc no man can measure, 
no mind can conceive. It is progressively 
destructive, and in each succeeding genera- 
tion, because of sharpened instruments of 
slaughter, an augmented toll of life and 
treasure is taken from the nations who 
choose to indulge in it. Nevertheless its 
ancient fascination has continued unbroken. 
Men have refused to see that it is a sin 
against God, and a crime against mankind. 
How can the needed lesson be taught? 
Apparently only by a world-devastating, 
world-shattering war, not a short war but 
a long one, not a cheap war, but an expensive 
war, so expensive that the richest nations 
of the world will be left bankrupt, not a 
local war but a war stretching around the 
whole earth, that the entire human race may 
be made to realize what war really is. In 
our generation Germany has been pre- 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 73 

eminently the home of the war cult. It is 
there that the art of human slaughter has 
been carried to its loftiest and most devilish 
perfection. In Germany the military caste 
has been granted a prestige and pre- 
eminence allowed it nowhere else. From 
the German press has flowed a constant 
stream of military literature poisoning the 
mind of the whole world. In this way Ger- 
many has made herself a nuisance and 
menace. At a time considered opportune 
by these war nabobs of Potsdam, the present 
gigantic conflict was launched. There was 
nothing for the neighbours of Germany to 
do but to try and curb this wild outburst of 
lawlessness and barbarism. When her 
neighbours were discovered to be unable to 
cope with the giant, our own Republic went 
to their assistance. For over a year we 
have been giving assistance toward the 
winning of the war. Many suggestions 
have been offered as to how it is to be won. 
Some have said it is by ships, others have 
said by aeroplanes, others by munitions, 
others by food, and others by money, but 
while all these are indispensable, they will 
not of themselves bring final victory. The 
victory is to be won not by material things 
of any sort, but by the pouring out of 



74 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

human life. The war will be won not by 
coal or by steel, by wheat or by gold, but by 
men who are willing to die. The world will 
be made safe for Democracy only by a dying 
man ! It is an awful fact which we ought 
calmly to face that without the shedding of 
human blood there can be no military 
triumph. Our supreme contribution to the 
M^ar will not be anything that we can get 
out of our mines or our shops, out of our 
soil or our shipyards, but only what we take 
out of our homes. It will be the best and 
the strongest of our youth who will go to 
the front, and many of them will never come 
back. There will be mourning — it may be — 
in ten thousand homes, but this will be our 
consolation. These young men will not 
have died in vain. They will by the laying 
down of their lives have assisted in breaking 
the power of a diabolical tradition, and in 
overthrowing one of the most merciless and 
savage hordes of war-makers which have 
ever cursed and disgraced the world. 
These young men will not die for them- 
selves. They will die for others — they will 
die for us. They will die for all men every- 
where. They will die for the German 
peasants who have had no heart in the war, 
but who have been lashed to the wheels of 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING 75 

the chariots of the war lords who have 
dragged them to the field of blood. They 
will die for generations yet unborn. Their 
sacrificial death will have a potency which 
will continue to work for ages. They will 
enter by their dying as a permanent force 
into the life of the world. They will make 
it easier for others to live. They will add 
a brightness to the skies which will bend 
over their graves. 

Wonderful is the power of vicarious suf- 
fering. Even the babies do not die in vain. 
Those babies in London and other cities, 
torn to shreds by the cruel bombs, the dead 
bodies of those little children floating on 
the waters that closed over the Lusitania, do 
you suppose they died in vain? I tell you 
nay! Those little ones plead trumpet 
tongued to all the world against the deep 
damnation of their taking off. The manner 
of their death blows Germany's horrid deed 
into every eye, and deepens in unnumbered 
hearts the indestructible determination that 
the barbarians and brigands of Potsdam 
shall not win. The women do not suffer 
in vain. Their sad eyes and white faces will 
rise whenever hereafter any man attempts 
to orate on the glories of war. The aged 
men and women who were starved to death 



76 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

in their cottages and hovels did not die in 
vain. The remembrance of their sufferings 
and death has already intensified the loath- 
someness of war, and has hastened the day 
when war shall be buried without hope of 
resurrection. 

Majestic and mysterious is the potency of 
vicarious death. It is appointed unto each 
one of us to die. For most of us death will 
be an incident speedily forgotten, with no 
appreciable influence on the conduct and 
career of the world. But when men die for 
others, their death becomes a form of life. 
They rule men's spirits from their urns. 
The death of Jesus is the mightiest power in 
human history. Its efficacy lies in the fact 
that He was sinless and that He died for 
others and that He was the Son of God. 
You will not find the secret of Jesus' power 
in the Sermon on the Mount, or in His 
parables, or in His miracles. It is to be 
found where He told us to look for it — in 
His death. He spoke truly when He said 
that unless a grain of wheat falls into the 
ground and dies, it abides alone, but if it 
dies it brings forth fruit. He read the 
future clearly, and showed His mastery of 
the principles of life when He declared : " I, 
if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." 



VICARIOUS SUFFERING ^^ 

The human heart is hard and stubborn. It 
can withstand much. There is something, 
however, which it cannot permanently re- 
sist. It cannot resist love which is faithful 
unto death. Paul was only the first of 
an innumerable multitude to surrender, 
chastened and overpowered by the thought: 
" He loved me and gave himself up for me ! " 



LECTURE III 

THE IDEA AND PRAC- 
TICE OF PRAYER 



LECTURE III 

THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF 
PRAYER 

THE immediate effect of war is to 
drive men to their knees. Any 
sudden catastrophe awakens the 
soul, and the soul, when facing immediate 
peril, throws itself back on God. It is as 
true to-day as it was when the Hebrew poet 
wrote the 107th Psalm, that when men are 
overtaken by disaster, they cry unto the 
Lord in their trouble. Man is by nature a 
praying animal, and whenever he lives in 
the depths of his being, he instinctively cries 
out for God. 

Europe was not in a prayerful mood in 
the early summer of 1914. Europe was 
worldly, heedless, skeptical. Christianity 
had fallen on evil days. The leaders of 
society in large numbers had built altars to 
strange gods, and multitudes of the people 
were eating and drinking with no thought 
or fear of their Creator. The churches were 
largely forsaken. Christianity survived as 
8i 



82 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

a living force in many individual hearts, but 
it did not mould the policy of nations, nor 
was it a ruling power in the life of the 
masses of the people. But early in August 
all was changed. In the twinkling of an 
eye, Europe passed from a holiday mood 
into a mood more serious than it had ever 
known. Men suddenly faced a war, the 
dimensions of which no one could conjec- 
ture. Husbands and sons were torn from 
their homes by the millions, and their faces 
were set toward the field of blood. Immedi- 
ately the churches became crowded. It was 
not an isolated phenomenon, a sight wit- 
nessed in only one country, it was common 
to all countries. The Russian and German 
and French and British papers reported the 
same scenes. Men before proceeding to the 
front went into the church to pray. After 
they had departed, men, too old to fight, 
and women thronged the churches, pouring 
out their sad hearts to God. It looked for a 
time as though all the belligerent countries 
might be swept by a great spiritual awaken- 
ing. In many cities special prayer meetings 
were held, and church members, who had 
hitherto cared only for the sermon, now 
found themselves hungry for the prayers. 
In supplication to the Almighty the heart 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 83 

found relief not to be obtained in any other 
way. In every nation throngs of reverent 
people besought God day and night that He 
would not forsake them, and lead their 
armies to victory. 

Then gradually there came a change. 
The early fervour cooled. The initial en- 
thusiasm died down. The congregations 
dwindled. The thoughts of men were fixed 
more and more on military preparations. 
Women had a thousand things to do, things 
apparently more immediately necessary 
than praying. Many thoughtful persons be- 
gan to ask themselves if prayer after all is 
efficacious in time of war. The fact that 
Christians were praying on opposite sides 
struck many as highly ludicrous. The spec- 
tacle of learned and gifted Germans impor- 
tuning God for the overthrow of England, 
while gifted and learned Britishers were 
imploring Him to wreak vengeance on Ger- 
many, threw the practice of prayer into a 
new light, and gave the ungodly large op- 
portunity to blaspheme. 

As the war went on, it became increas- 
ingly evident that victory could not be se- 
cured by supplications to the Almighty. He 
did not seem to hear what any of the nations 
were saying. Each nation seemed to sue- 



84 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

ceed just in proportion to the number of its 
guns and the skill of its generals, the result 
being that prayer fell more and more into 
the background. War is a vast physical 
enterprise. Armies fight with carnal weap- 
ons. The apparatus of war is ponderous 
and complicated, and to create and sustain 
this apparatus requires the expenditure of a 
large share of the mental energy of a nation. 
Howitzers are wonderfully effective when 
they are big enough, and are placed on solid 
foundations, and are manipulated by men 
who know how to use them. Submarines 
and aeroplanes are discovered to be indis- 
pensable to a nation which is going to win. 
In the realm of war, Napoleon's dictum 
seems to be correct that God is on the side 
of the biggest battalions. He seems to pay 
more respect to the size of the shell and 
the skill of the gunner than to the right- 
eousness of the cause which the gunner rep- 
resents. And so war must always be what 
it has been from the beginning, a terrible 
materializer of the human heart. It fixes 
the attention on physical machinery, and 
men come unconsciously and inevitably to 
underestimate the value of spiritual forces. 
To multitudes prayer comes to be an 
anachronism, an impertinence, almost a 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 85 

joke. When one is dealing with machine 
guns and hand grenades, and poisonous 
gases, it seems absurd to ask anybody to 
squander time in prayer. Prayer may have 
a minor function in the piping days of peace, 
but surely it is out of place in the blustering 
and awful days of war. 

And so the journalists never call upon 
their readers to pray. They ask them to 
buy Liberty Bonds, to conserve the coal and 
the wheat, to combat German propaganda, 
to push forward the construction of ships 
and of guns, to enlist in the army or the 
navy, but not a word is said about prayer. 
According to the newspapers, there are only 
three essentials in modern warfare; men, 
munitions and money. The man who would 
add prayer as a fourth would be laughed at. 
One paper says the war will be won by 
ships, another is sure it will be won by steel, 
another asserts that it will be won by food, 
another is certain it will be won by aero- 
planes, another thinks it is largely a matter 
of coal, another of copper, and another of 
money. All these things are physical. 
They can be seen and measured and 
handled. No journalist has yet suggested 
that prayer may possibly be one of the 
weapons by which the stronghold of evil is 



86 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

to be pulled down. When we go to the 
arsenal of war to gaze upon the instruments 
by which our modern warriors are to hack 
their way to triumph, we find battle-ships 
and submarines, torpedo boat destroyers 
and armoured cruisers, aeroplanes and 
howitzers, bayonets and liquid fire, but 
prayer is conspicuous for its absence. We 
have reached, they tell us, a crisis in the 
world's life, a momentous day more 
tragically important than any other day 
known to history, a time when all available 
forces must be mobilized for the defense of 
righteousness; but when you scan the list 
of the forces wdiich are available you find 
that prayer has been omitted. Lumps of 
coal, bits of copper, plates of steel, loaves of 
bread, these all are recognized as forces, 
mighty and indispensable, without which no 
nation can hope to win, but prayer, by many 
of the wise men of our modern world, is 
not considered a force at all. They cast it 
as rubbish to the void, and make their pile 
complete without it. 

There is much to be said in justification 
of their position. Recent experience seems 
to support them. Did not Russia pray at 
the opening of the war? Did not the Czar 
and the Holy Synod fill the cathedrals of 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 87 

Petrograd and Moscow with throngs of de- 
vout and earnest-hearted men and women 
to pray for the victory of the Russian arms? 
The pictures of those praying multitudes 
are still vivid before our eyes. And have 
other nations not had days of prayer, days 
set aside by governmental and ecclesiastical 
authority, on which the hearts of God- 
fearing men have been united in an agony 
of appeal to the Heavenly Father to stay 
the awful ravages of the plague, and to lead 
the feet of the nations into the paths of 
peace? And what have these days of 
prayer accomplished? 

Have not millions of Christian hearts all 
over the world besought God in secret 
chambers, day and night, to have compas- 
sion on our poor bleeding mangled race, and 
to curb the wild passions of fighting men? 
Through nearly four long drawn years 
these prayers have continuously ascended, 
but the heavens have remained as brass and 
the earth still runs blood! It is not to be 
wondered at that the skeptics of the 
twentieth century repeat the questions of 
the Book of Job : " What is the Almighty 
that we should serve him? And what 
profit should we have, if we pray unto him?" 

All this is exerting an influence on the 



88 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

Christian Church. Christians can never 
escape entirely the spirit of their time. The 
same forces which play upon the men of the 
world play upon Christians also, and church 
members as well as unbelievers respond in 
varying- measures to the pressure to which 
they are subjected. When the question is 
asked : What can the Christian Church do 
at a time like this? there are many Chris- 
tians who would never think of prayer as 
a cardinal part of the Church's contribution 
to the winning of the war. The average 
mind runs of¥ at once to thoughts of things 
material, such as knitting sweaters and 
socks, and making bandages, surgical dress- 
ings, and collecting clothing. To many of 
us this seems the supreme work; to a few of 
us, perhaps, it seems the only work which 
really counts. The binding up of physical 
wounds becomes in time of war so tremen- 
dously important that it is likely to dwarf 
every other form of service, and even 
Christian men and women are in danger of 
forgetting the very thing which Christ and 
His apostles counted all important. Philan- 
thropy in all of its forms looks superlatively 
lovely to our eyes at a time like this, and 
for one Christian who feels the immeasur- 
able importance of constant communion 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 89 

with God, there are, perhaps, a dozen 
Christians who are most of all interested in 
sending tobacco and candy to the soldiers 
in the camps, or in providing for them 
entertainments which will break the monot- 
ony of camp life. To the average man in 
the Church, as also to the man in the street, 
prayer in war time takes a back seat. 
Prayer seems more appropriate and defensi- 
ble in time of peace. When we are doing 
our utmost to make the world safe for 
democracy, many of us feel we are too busy 
to pray. To be sure, our Lord says that 
men ought always to pray, but then He 
never anticipated such a war as this! 

The war has forced upon all thoughtful 
Christians a reconsideration of the entire 
doctrine of prayer. Questions have arisen 
which will not down. Prayer has for a long 
time been a problem for many. Modern 
scientific conceptions have made havoc with 
many of the old views. The idea of law, uni- 
versal and unchangeable, has weakened the 
confidence of many a man in the efficacy of 
prayer. In a universe which works so much 
like a machine there seems to be no room 
for prayer. The war has accentuated the 
old difficulties, and forced them upon us in a 
new form. How can you fit prayer into a 



90 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

world geared up for the slaughter of men 
by machinery? Questions such as these 
keep running through the mind: Is it worth 
while to pray? Does anything happen as 
the result of my praying which would not 
happen if I never prayed? What can I bring 
to pass by my praying in time of war? Can 
I reach by my petitions the field of battle? 
Can I influence the program of an army? 
Can I safeguard a human life by my suppli- 
cations? Can I hasten by my entreaties the 
coming of peace? Or is prayer out of place 
on the battle-front? When men descend to 
the field of slaughter, do they enter a king- 
dom where the laws of prayer do not pre- 
vail? When men commit themselves to the 
arbitrament of bayonets, is it worth while to 
pray any longer? What can I do for the 
individual soldier by my prayers? If I con- 
clude that I can serve the individual, am I 
to assume that I can do something for a 
nation by my supplications? Or is a nation 
too large to handle in this way? Is interces- 
sory prayer solely for individuals, and must 
nations be left to the operation of other 
forces? Is it presumptuous for one to pray 
for millions of people at once? In short, is 
prayer sensible or efificaclous in the interna- 
tional realm? Assurance is all important 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 9 1 

in the domain of prayer. We cannot pray 
with satisfaction so long as our mind is har- 
assed by questions and torn by doubts. An 
ancient writer considered it axiomatic that 
" he that cometh to God must beheve that 
he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that 
seek after him." 

These -questions are no longer academic. 
The war is making them grimly practical. 
Hundreds of thousands of American boys 
are already in France. Other hundreds of 
thousands are going. They leave behind 
them loving and anxious hearts. These 
hearts will follow them with affectionate 
thoughts. They will follow them also with 
thoughts which are turned toward God. 
And even in the midst of the praying there 
will come now and then the question : What 
can I hope to accomplish by this? Many 
hearts will pray on, not daunted by ques- 
tions. They will remember that Christ said 
that men ought always to pray, and this will 
be sufficient. Others, however, will wrestle 
with doubts. They will be driven to pray 
by the exigencies of the situation. When it 
is impossible to reach their loved ones by 
letter, or when a great battle is on, the heart 
will assert its rights. It will go boldly to 
the throne of grace and speak. But later 



92 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

on, there will be questionings. One must 
of course walk by faith, but it is instinctive 
to seek rational grounds for faith. No one 
wants to do a futile thing. The honest 
heart cannot repress the query: What can 
be accomplished by prayer? The father 
and mother will pray for their son, the wife 
for her husband, the sister for her brother, 
the maiden for her lover, the grandparents 
for the sons of their children,, Through 
these solemn months a vast company will be 
praying. Men who have not been in the 
habit of praying will pray now. Women 
who have prayed languidly will pray fer- 
vently. Households which have been 
prayerless will have a new atmosphere. 
Questions which have hitherto remained 
outside the circle of immediate concern will 
become fascinating and absorbing. The 
mind once started on the track of inquiry 
does not readily turn back. There is no 
desire keener when once aroused than the 
desire to know. Multitudes will become 
conscious of their ignorance of these high 
things of the spirit, and will struggle 
valiantly for light. 

Most of us believe in prayer as an exercise 
beneficial to ourself. There can be no doubt 
of its subjective effects. They are good. 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 93 

The experiment can be tried. Wherever it 
is tried faithfully the outcome is the same. 
Men who pray most are most certain of the 
blessings of prayer. They are blessings 
which fall within the circle of consciousness. 
When we pray in the spirit, our troubles vex 
us less, our burdens become lighter, there 
comes into the heart a certain mysterious 
tranquillity. At times there comes a new 
strength, confidence, courage by which we 
are enabled to do or to bear what seemed 
to us impossible. Or perhaps the answer 
comes in the form of gladness. The shad- 
ows vanish. We find ourselves in the sun- 
shine again. There is no doubt of the sub- 
jective effect of prayer. But this is not 
enough — not enough for a crisis like this. 
This is a time when we want to pray for 
others. We want to know whether the 
results of prayer are solely subjective, shut 
up within the mind which prays, or whether 
there are results which are objective, lying 
completely outside the praying mind. For 
instance, when we pray for our soldiers be- 
yond the Atlantic, there will come a certain 
relief to our own burdened hearts, but will 
any relief come to those for whom our 
prayers are offered? Can we touch their 
mind by our petitions? Can we soothe or 



94 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

brace their hearts by our supplications? 
Can we key their courage to a higher pitch? 
Can we breathe into them comfort, strength 
and cheer? Can we take off the edge of 
their loneHness? Can we make better sol- 
diers of them by our prayers? 

This leads to another question. If it is 
granted that we can hearten men's minds 
three thousand miles away by our prayers, 
can we do anything for their bodies also? 
Can we protect their flesh from the cruel 
shell? Can we alter the curve of a flying 
bullet? Can we reduce the power of a high 
explosive? Can we neutralize the poison of 
an asphyxiating gas? Can we shift the 
wind by our petitions and save a regiment 
from the deadly vapour? Can we reduce by 
continual praying the number of the 
wounded? Is it possible by the prayer of 
faith to beat back even on the battle-field 
that old enemy death? 

If you admit that even in the physical 
realm desired results can be obtained by 
prayer, the question arises, how can you tell 
what it is that has been accomplished? A 
mother, whose boy is at the front, prays 
fervently that he may be safeguarded from 
all harm. She prays for him morning, noon 
and night. The boy comes through the bat- 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 95 

tie unscathed. He has several wonderful 
escapes. j\Ien are killed all around him. 
He remains untouched. All his comrades 
are wounded, some of them fatally, but he 
comes out without a scratch. Later on 
word arrives that the boy is safe. In a let- 
ter he recounts to his mother all the perils 
through which he has passed. He tells her 
he has no doubt he owes his life to her 
prayers. The jubilant woman overflows 
with gratitude to God. She now believes in 
prayer as never before. She has had posi- 
tive demonstration that God is good. Hav- 
ing seen, she now believes. She tells all 
her neighbours of God's goodness to her 
and of how wonderfully her prayers were 
answered. She wonders that any one can 
doubt the efficacy of prayer, or the goodness 
and the power of God. 

But a few doors down the street there 
lives another woman whose son is also at 
the front. She is devout and prays to God 
day and night for the safety of her boy. 
She commits him to His keeping, and in 
faith expects her son to return. After the 
battle is ended, her son is found among the 
dead. She had thrown her prayers around 
him, but in vain. She had done all that love 
could do, but love was impotent. She had 



96 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

committed her only child to God, and God 
had permitted him to be blown to pieces by 
a bursting shell. She listens with incredu- 
lity to what her neighbour says about the 
certainty of God answering prayer. Here 
then are two facts which clash. A mother 
prays, and her son is saved; another mother 
prays and her son is killed. Was prayer 
operative in either case? The old question 
pushes itself back again: Is it worth one's 
while to pray? Does anything happen as a 
direct result of prayer? Are the supposed 
answers to prayer only coincidences, chance 
happenings? Is there a God who pays at- 
tention to the petitions of us mortals? 

These are questions which will occur to 
parents and brothers and sisters and lovers 
and friends, and even little children, when 
they pray for their father, will ask their 
sad-eyed mother whether God is sure to 
hear. Prayer is becoming an urgently 
practical subject to all of us, and to none is 
the subject so vitally important as to those 
of us who call ourselves Christians. For 
we Christians are committed to the doc- 
trine of prayer. Our Lord was a man of 
prayer. He prayed for Himself, He prayed 
for others. He prayed in secret, in public, 
in the home, in the synagogue, in the tem- 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 97 

pie, in the fields, in the streets. He prayed 
so often and so fervently that those who 
came the nearest to Him felt they had never 
mastered the art of praying. " Lord, teach 
us to pray! We do not know how!" He 
is revealed to us in the Gospels as praying 
at all the crises of His life. He went out of 
this world praying. He exhorted all men 
to pray. He warned them against fainting. 
He urged them to keep on, and on, and on. 
It was His conviction that the heavens can 
be opened by prayer, and that by it blessings 
can be secured which are not to be obtained 
in any other way. His word for us all is: 
" Men ought always to pray and not to 
faint." Prove that prayer, either in peace 
or in war, is of no avail, and you shatter the 
Christian religion. 

It is not to be regretted that the war has 
forced on us a restudy of the doctrine of 
prayer. Our prayer life has been too long 
neglected. The doctrine of prayer has not 
received at the hands of religious teachers 
the critical attention it has deserved. The 
instruction of the pulpit has not been full or 
precise enough at this point. Much of the 
praying of Christian people has been de- 
moralizing because they were never in- 
structed in the laws of prayer. Christ has 



98 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

told us that we ought not to pray after the 
fashion of the pagans, and yet there are 
large pagan elements in much of the 
Christian praying of the world. Multitudes 
have never grasped Christ's high conception 
of prayer. They have conceived of prayer 
as a sort of magic by means of which we can 
induce God against His natural inclination 
to show us a favour. Thousands of years 
ago, men prayed to God simply for what 
they thought they might get out of Him, 
and there are men in the twentieth century 
who have gotten no further. There are 
many Christians whose prayer life has been 
tragically disappointing because they have 
prayed in the wrong way and for the wrong 
things. It is an ancient blunder. Even in 
the first century the Bishop of Jerusalem 
was compelled to write to his converts: 
" You ask and receive not, because you ask 
amiss." Many Christians imagine they have 
a right to ask God for anything they can 
think of, and then fall into the slough of 
despondency because God pays no attention 
to their requests. It is the vicious ways of 
praying, and the false claims which have 
been made for prayer, which have been re- 
sponsible for not a little of the skepticism 
both in the Church and out of it. If you 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 99 

claim too much for prayer, you weaken con- 
fidence in all prayer whatsoever. If you 
insist on thrusting prayer into regions 
where it does not belong, you expose it to 
the ridicule of ail men who think. If you 
try to substitute prayer for some other form 
of energy, you awaken expectations which 
can never be fulfilled. If you persist in con- 
sidering prayer a form of magic which you 
can make use of to get you out of hard 
places, you are certain, soon or late, to find 
yourself in a situation where the magic will 
not work. 

There were many devout Christians who 
felt at the beginning of the war that the war 
would never have gotten fairly started if 
only a few thousand good people had then 
and there offered up a prayer of faith. They 
had no doubt this world catastrophe could 
have been warded off, if only Christian men 
and women in large numbers had asked God 
to do it. When He did not do it they were 
convinced that the prayers had not been 
offered in faith. That is a favourite way of 
accounting for all the delayed answers to 
prayer. 

All through the war we have been as- 
sured from time to time by sundry pious 
people that the war could be stopped almost 



ICX) OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

any day if only devout men and women 
would implore God to stop it. Prayer, in 
their conception, is a sort of magician's 
wand, and all you have to do is to wave the 
wand, and you can then have just the kind 
of world you want. We have had a rude 
awakening. The popular conception of 
prayer must be purged of its heathen im- 
purities, and we must bring our practice of 
prayer into line with the methods of God 
as these have been revealed to us. 

It must be borne in mind that there is a 
law of prayer. Man's spiritual life does not 
lie outside the sovereignty of law. We do 
not in passing from the physical to the 
spiritual leave the God of law behind us. 
Prayer is a rational act of the human per- 
sonality, and like everything else ordained 
of God, it is held in the grip of His orderly 
mind. It is because prayer has been so 
often placed outside of the kingdom of 
law that men scientifically trained have 
looked askance at it. A man educated in 
the modern schools does not like magic. 
He does not feel at home in the realm of the 
accidental and the whimsical. The only 
God whom he knows is a God of order, and 
if he is to believe in prayer, then prayer 
must be lifted out of the realm of caprice. 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER lOI 

The modern man knows that all things are 
conditioned. Sequences cannot be altered 
by wishes. Certain antecedents produce 
certain consequents everywhere and always. 
Change your causes and you change your 
effects. The chemist always knows what to 
expect, so does the physicist, and so does 
the astronomer. Things do not happen by 
accident in the univ^erse so far as we know 
it, and it is not likely that in the life of the 
soul things are left to run at haphazard. 
The soul as well as the atom is under law. 
It prospers when it is obedient to that law. 
Disobedience brings discord and disaster. 

Prayer is a force. When God created 
the universe of forces He made a place for 
the play of the prayer-force. This force is 
not an intruder, or upstart. It is at home 
in human life. A kingdom was provided for 
it from the foundation of the world. It does 
not annihilate other forces, or act independ- 
ently of them. It cooperates with other 
forces for the securing of desired ends. Ac- 
cording to the New Testament all answers 
to prayer are conditioned. These condi- 
tions are fixed and can no more be changed 
than can the conditions which the chemist 
deals with in his laboratory. The law of 
prayer is as sacred and eternal as the law of 



I02 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

gravitation. Laws cannot be suspended by 
the repetition of pious formulas. There is 
a harvest law in the physical world, and 
there is a harvest law in the world of the 
soul. Whatsoever a man sows that shall 
he also reap. This law cannot be abrogated 
by prayer. A man who indulges to excess 
in alcoholic liquors for twenty years cannot 
by an earnest prayer change in an hour or 
a day the processes which have been started 
in his blood and body. What he has sown 
he must reap. You cannot change the law 
of gravitation by a prayer. The man who 
drives his automobile over a precipice goes 
to the bottom no matter how many prayers 
may be offered by the horrified onlookers. 
The man who sows his field with tares can- 
not change those tares into roses by offering 
up a series of Pater Nosters. You cannot 
set a great city blazing and then stop the 
conflagration by falling on your knees. This 
is a truth which was forgotten by the 
enthusiastic persons who thought that the 
war could have been checked at the begin- 
ning, if only groups of believing souls had 
prayed. You cannot abrogate the law of 
the harvest by your supplications. For a 
generation Europe had sown bayonets, and 
when the time arrived for it to reap battles. 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER I03 

it \vas too late to stop the war by prayer. 
For forty years the statesmen of Europe had 
soaked their nations with naphtha, and 
when the continent caught fire from the 
pistol shot in Serajevo, it was impossible to 
quench the flames by invocations addressed 
to the King of Kings. You can no more 
check the conflagration of a blazing conti- 
nent by prayer than you can check by a 
pious wish the tongues of flame which are 
licking up the buildings of a wooden city on 
a windy day. How pathetic it was to see 
the pious Russians on their knees. Of 
course God could not grant their request. 
For generations the government of Russia 
had been tyrannical and corrupt. Rulers in 
Church and State had been shamefully 
recreant to their trust, and the very fabric 
of society had grown rotten. How absurd, 
therefore, for any one to suppose that God 
could give victory to the arms of any nation 
which had trampled on His laws so out- 
rageously and so long. There are times 
when God plainly says to a nation: "When 
you spread forth your hands I will hide 
mine eyes from you : Yea. when ye make 
many prayers, I will not hear." There is 
a law of prayer and there is a law of the 
harvest, and the first cannot annihilate or 



I04 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

suspend the latter. H is easy for a govern- 
ment to appoint a day of prayer on \Ahich 
all the people are to ask the Almighty to 
help them out of their distresses, but 
whether or not the prayer is granted de- 
pends on the previous conduct of the people, 
and also upon the present condition of their 
hearts. A prophet long ago told his coun- 
trymen that their praying was all in vain. 
He assured them that he could hear God 
saying: " Bring no more vain oblations; in- 
cense is an abomination unto me. Wash 
you, make you clean ; put away the evil of 
your doings from before mine eyes; cease 
to do evil; learn to do well." 

One of the cardinal laws of prayer is the 
law of limitations. Prayer is efficacious only 
within definite and narrow limits. To claim 
that it can do everything is to jeopardize 
one's belief that it can do anything. When 
men say sarcastically : " You cannot win a 
war by prayer " the reply is: What you say 
is true. Nor can you win a war by copper, 
or by steel, or by coal, or by wheat. You 
cannot win it by aeroplanes, or submarines, 
or by howitzers or hand grenades, or by 
torpedo boat destroyers, or trawlers, or by 
military skill or by millions of men. You 
cannot win a war by any one of these by 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 105 

itself, or by any three or four of them taken 
together. But you might win a war by 
combining them all. There are a multitude 
of forces which must be bound together for 
the winning of a war, and when you make 
out your list, do not fail to put the prayer- 
force in. You cannot win a war by prayer 
alone, but combined with other forces it 
works mightily. 

We recognize the limitations of prayer in 
the physical realm, and it is important that 
we should admit limitations in the spiritual 
realm also. We know that we cannot 
change the colour of our eyes by praying, 
or the shape of our nose, or the height of 
our stature. We realize that we cannot by 
praying cause apple trees to blossom in 
February, or bring on a snow-storm at the 
end of June. There are vast realms in 
which prayer is able to do nothing. God 
has told us in our experience that there are 
things about which we are not to talk to 
Him, He has informed us that there are 
thousands of things for which we are never 
to ask. But we are slow to take the hint, 
and too often we rush into provinces where 
it is not lawful for us to go, and ask for 
things which are as clearly beyond the reach 
of our prayers as the colour of our eyes or 



Io6 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

the shape of our chin. Many Christians are 
discouraged in their Christian hfe because 
they have never paid attention to this law of 
limitations. By assuming that they have the 
privilege of asking for anything they want, 
they meet with so many refusals at the 
hand of God that they come at last to ques- 
tion His willingness to listen to any petition 
at all. 

God does not allow us to substitute one 
form of energy for another. We often com- 
mit to the prayer faculty duties which be- 
long to other powers of the soul. Prayer, 
for instance, will never fill the place of 
physical labour. There are many blessings 
which can be obtained only by manual toil, 
and to try to substitute for such toil religious 
devotions is a sort of blasphemy which God 
treats with contempt. You cannot by pray- 
ing coax out of the soil either oats or barley, 
or corn or wheat. No man can raise rad- 
ishes or cucumbers or tomatoes or peas by 
saying his prayers over a patch of prepared 
soil. If you want vegetables you must work 
for them. The farmer who spends his sum- 
mer afternoons in a camp meeting will find 
a short harvest when autumn arrives. Corn 
fields have great respect for a man with a 
hoe : they care nothing for a man on his 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 107 

knees. JMuscle and steel are prime essen- 
tials in the raising of crops. It is wise for 
a farmer to pray. He will be a better 
farmer than he would be if he lived a prayer- 
less life. But prayer cannot take the place 
of the plow and the hoe and the perspiration 
of his brow on an August day. Prayer is 
good only when held in its place. 

Like the farmer, the surgeon depends on 
muscle and steel. It is a good thing for 
the surgeon to pray, but he cannot depend 
entirely on his religious faith. He may 
speak to God often in the course of his 
work, but without skill and his instruments 
he is nothing. A surgeon with a prayerless 
heart, but possessed of skill and a sharp 
knife, is more to be desired than a surgeon 
whg remains long at his prayers, but is too 
lazy to perfect his skill or sharpen his lancet. 
God does not allow us to substitute prayer 
for anything else. 

We send our boys and girls to school not 
that they may pray, but that they may 
study. You cannot do anything with the 
Greek conjugations or the Latin declensions 
by attending prayer meeting. Piety cannot 
be substituted for honest mental toil. 
Mathematics is a kingdom which opens not 
to the man who has a devotional vocabulary, 



I08 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

but to the man who is willing to do a deal 
of hard work. A student should pray. 
Every seeker after truth should keep as 
close to God as he can. Every one who 
would hold his brain at its highest point of 
efficiency ought to be in harmony with the 
Supreme mind at which all our intellectual 
torches are lit, but prayer is not a substitute 
for intellectual exertion, and only he goes 
into the kingdom of scholarship who is will- 
ing 
" To scorn delights, and live laborious days." 

Even spiritual institutions cannot be sus- 
tained and made successful by prayer. A 
Christian Church cannot survive without 
prayer, but prayer alone will never make a 
church prosperous. There must be a deal 
of hard and honest mental work. There 
must be meditation, careful planning, a look- 
ing backward and a looking forward, a con- 
stant forthputting of the full measure of the 
energy of all the faculties of the mind, not 
only of the minister but of many of the lay- 
men, and not only must the mind be willing 
to spend and be spent, but hands and feet 
must effectively cooperate, the bodies of 
men as well as their souls being offered a 
living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God. 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER 109 

Many churches are comparatively impotent 
in the community because they persist in 
substituting songs and prayers for heroic, 
aggressive, and self-sacrificing labour. 

The great war lights up in a most start- 
ling manner the fatal consequences of trying 
to substitute prayer for something else. 
Europe has for a thousand years been a 
continent of prayer. Cathedrals and 
churches exist in large numbers in all 
European countries, and in these sacred edi- 
fices companies of devout souls have 
through the generations offered up their 
prayers. Europeans and Americans alike 
have prayed continually for peace. The 
world has unitedly implored God to save it 
from the awful scourge of war. Christians 
in every land have repeated the beatitude: 
" Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall 
be called the sons of God," and have 
bowed the knee to Jesus Christ, the Prince 
of Peace. But alas ! praying for peace is 
one thing, and working for peace is another 
thing. The first is easy, the second is hard. 
The first costs nothing, the second costs 
much. The first exposes one to no persecu- 
tion, the second provokes the world's criti- 
cism and scorn. How few peace workers 
there have been in any country within the 



no OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

last fifty years. Little groups of men did 
what they could, but their following was 
meager, and their influence upon govern- 
ment was almost nothing. They were 
caricatured and lied about by nearly all the 
papers. Millions of Christians have prayed 
for peace, but only hundreds of them have 
worked for it. And now we see what it 
costs not to labour for peace. If the nations 
had laboured for peace within the last fifty 
years with one-tenth of the energy with 
which they have toiled to prepare for war, 
this world-shattering catastrophe would 
never have been. Everybody knows that 
it costs much to wage war. Millions of men 
and billions of treasure — that is the cost of 
war. That is also the cost of peace. We 
never can have peace on this earth until we 
work for it, and we are never going to work 
for it until we love it with all our heart and 
mind and soul. Which one of the nations 
of the world has within the last fifty years 
spent a paltry million dollars in cementing 
international friendships, or used the energy 
of even a thousand men in constructing a 
plan by which the world might be saved this 
recurring baptism of blood and tears? No, 
the Christian nations have never worked for 
peace. The Christian diplomats have as a 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER III 

rule not worked for it. The Christian 
parHaments and congresses have not worked 
for it. The Christian Church has not worked 
for it. The Christian Church has prayed 
for it. The pulpit has talked now and then 
about it, but never since Jesus died on the 
cross have the Christian clergy or the 
Christian laity worked whole-heartedly, and 
resolutely, and self-sacrificingly for the over- 
:thro\v of the god of war, and the ringing 
in of a thousand years of peace. 

Do we then disparage prayer when we 
group it along with other forces? Do we 
deny it that royal place which it holds in the 
Christian Gospels? No! Do you disparage 
a man when you say that he cannot do 
certain things which a horse can do? He 
is the lord of creation, and do you break his 
scepter when you say that a dog in certain 
respects far surpasses him? Do you dis- 
parage electricity when you call attention 
to the fact that there are many things which 
the electric current cannot do? Within its 
own province electricity is a giant, a Titan, 
almost a god. And yet what severe and 
unescapable limitations! It is one of the 
mightiest of known forces. There are a 
hundred wonders it is able to perform. It 
can light vast cities. It can convert the 



112 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

night into day. It can induce men to forget 
the moon and stars. It can turn a million 
wheels. It can manufacture things to work 
with and to wear. It can carry millions of 
people, and tons of merchandise through 
long distances. We stand awed in the 
presence of a power so amazing, and yet 
how limited electricity is, both in the doing 
of great things and in the doing of little 
things. Outside its narrow province it can 
do no mighty work. It cannot do a great 
thing, such as teaching a child to read, nor 
a little thing such as tying up a pound of 
tea. Electricity is mighty, but it works 
within limits, and it is best for us that these 
limits should be ascertained and acknowl- 
edged. We gain nothing by assuming that 
electricity can do everything. We lose 
much by assuming that prayer can do all. 
Within the limits set by the Almighty the 
prayer of the righteous man avails much. 
More things are wrought by prayer than 
this world dreams of, and still more things 
could be wrought if all men everywhere 
would study it, and use it according to the 
will of God. 

It should never be forgotten that prayer 
is a force to be used in conjunction with 
other forces. We are to work and pray, 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER II3 

serve and pray, watch and pray, suffer and 
pray. When Paul sketches his portrait of 
the Christian warrior, he mentions the belt 
and the breastplate, and the sandals, and the 
shield, and the helmet, and the sword, all 
essential pieces of armour, and he then adds 
prayer as the vitalizing force by which all 
these bits of armour are to become most 
highly effective. 

It is sometimes asserted that Christians 
think they can impose their will upon God. 
By their importunity they imagine they can 
induce the Almighty to exchange His plan 
for theirs. Instructed Christians think 
nothing of the sort. No prayer is truly 
Christian which does not breathe the spirit — 
" Not my will but thine be done." We do 
not want to change God's will; we want to 
bring ourselves up to it. We do not desire 
to alter His plan; we desire to know what 
His plan is and to fall in with it. " Thy 
kingdom come, thy will be done on earth 
as it is in heaven " — that is the cry of every 
truly Christian heart. It is not egotistical 
or presumptuous to pray, if we pray after 
the manner of Jesus. 

Nor is it futile to pray even for things 
which cannot be granted. Saul of Tarsus 
prayed repeatedly that a certain physical 



114 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

infirmity of his might be removed. His re- 
quest was denied, but his praying was re- 
warded. By prayer he was lifted above his 
thorn, and became able at last to say: "I 
take pleasure in weaknesses, injuries, in 
necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for 
Christ's sake : for when I am weak, then am 
I strong." 

Jesus implored God again and again that 
the cup might be removed from Him, and 
God denied His request, but by His prayer 
new channels were opened through which 
the divine power streamed into Jesus' soul. 
In the picturesque phrase of the Gospel — 
"An angel came and strengthened him." 
God did not take away the cup from His 
lips: He gave Him strength to drink it. 
When God does not give us what we ask. 
He gives us something better. 

Let us now return to the questions with 
which we started. In these heart-breaking 
days can we find relief in prayer? Certainly 
we can. If you doubt it, try it and see. 
Can we assist our soldiers in the trenches 
by our petitions? We have a right to believe 
we can. Jesus prayed for Simon Peter, and 
for many others. One man can help an- 
other by his prayers. We may not be able 
to explain how the help is imparted. We 



THE IDEA AND PRACTICE OF PRAYER I15 

do not know the character or possibiUties 
of the mystic bonds by which we are bound 
together. " Our echoes roll from soul to 
soul forever and forever," and if this be 
true, then a man is justified in praying not 
only for himself, but for all who call him 
friend. 

Is it possible to shield our boys by our 
prayers from weariness and wounds and 
suffering and death? No! In war, multi- 
tudes must suffer and die. That is the price 
of victory. When men are fighting for a 
righteous cause, we ought not to count that 
price too great. We have a right to pray 
that the cup may pass, but the heart must 
add : " Not my will but thine be done." We 
cannot be sure, then, that our boys will come 
home again. Thousands will come back, 
but ours may not be among them. What 
then? If we have prayed as Paul prayed, 
and as Jesus prayed, we shall have strength 
to rise above our grief, and be able by God's 
grace to thank Him that it was our privilege 
to share in the world agony, and to furnish 
sons who by their life and death made a 
contribution to the emancipation of the 
world. 



LECTURE IV 

THE ATTITUDE TO 
THE CHURCH 



LECTURE IV 

THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 

THE general attitude to the Church 
in our generation may be described 
as critical, not in the sense of dis- 
criminating appreciation, but in the sense of 
censoriousncss. For fifty years the Church 
has been exposed to a criticism more gen- 
eral and biting than it had been called upon 
to endure since the first centuries of its 
career. The condemning judgment has 
come from all quarters. It has swept across 
the world like a deluge. In many quarters 
the criticism has been supercilious and 
haughty, in other quarters it has been 
cynical and bitter. Many scoffers have 
thrown stones at it, and many prophets have 
gone abroad declaring that the Church is 
ready for the fire. No other institution in 
our day has been so vigorously castigated 
and cudgelled ; so mercilessly lampooned and 
trampled upon as the Church of Jesus 
Christ. The faultfinding and denunciation 
have been participated in by all sorts and 
119 



I20 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

conditions of men, from the highbrows of 
intellectual centers, down to the atheistic 
soap box orator, who is convinced that all 
religion is superstition, and that the Church, 
long the enemy of liberty and happiness, has 
been left hopelessly and forever behind. 

This incessant and vehement abuse has 
had its effect on the mind and heart of the 
clergy. Not a few of them have come to 
take a censorious attitude to the Church of 
Christ in general, and to their own branch 
of it in particular. It is not uncommon to 
hear a clergyman on the platform saying 
disparaging things of the Church, or to find 
him setting forth in some magazine or paper 
scornful estimates of the wisdom and power 
of organized Christianity, Its limitations 
are exploited, its sores are exhibited in the 
public square. Some of the severest 
strictures made upon the Church within the 
last quarter of a century and some of the 
most pessimistic views of its present condi- 
tion and outlook have been made by its or- 
dained leaders, men who might reasonably 
be expected not to exaggerate the defects 
of an institution to which they are com- 
mitted, or to be unduly hopeless of a cause 
whose fortune lies largely in their own 
hands. 



I 



d 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 121 

The effect of clerical criticism on the 
Church, combined with the tempest of fault- 
finding outside, has had a disastrous effect 
on large numbers of the laity. There are 
many Christian congregations in which the 
fires of enthusiasm burn low, and many com- 
munities in which the cohorts of the Lord 
are doing a halting and disappointing serv- 
ice. When a leader gives himself up to 
faultfinding and cynicism, he takes the 
heart out of those whom he has been called 
to lead. There are many thousands of 
church members who have no zeal for their 
church, and who have come to doubt the 
value of church membership altogether. It 
has become in many communities an ac- 
cepted truth that it is not necessary for a 
Christian to belong to the Church, and some 
amiable and intelligent people have gone 
so far as to assert that there are just as 
many good people outside the Church as 
inside, and that anybody can be just as 
faithful and useful a follower of Jesus Christ 
without any church connections as with 
them. It is an outstanding feature of the 
life of our day that many persons subscribe 
heartily to the teachings of Jesus of Naza- 
reth, and yet feel no responsibility for the 
prosperity of the institution which bears 



122 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

His name. There are men who applaud to 
the echo the name of Jesus who have noth- 
ing but jeers and groans for every mention 
of the Church. 

What will be the effect of the war on the 
attitude of church members and outsiders 
to the Church? It is an interesting question, 
and one worthy of our serious consideration. 
Already men have begun to give answers 
to it, and their answers do not agree. Some 
are convinced that the war is going to put 
an end to the Church, that the soldiers now 
at the front will have no use for the Church 
when they come home. The world is get- 
ting its eyes opened — they tell us — in this 
awful ordeal, and never again will humanity 
be willing to be hoodwinked by the old 
formulas and creeds. The Church has long 
been ready for the burning, and the fire has 
at last been prepared in which it is to be 
consumed. 

Others feel confident that the Church will 
survive the war, but that it will be radically 
changed. Its old methods will be discarded, 
its former programs will be revised, its mes- 
sage will be cast into a new form. Old 
things will have passed away, and nearly 
everything will become new. The new 
Church — men assure us — will be a vast im- 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 1 23 

provement on the old. With the ancient 
accretions sloughed off, men will in the fu- 
ture rally to the support of the Church in a 
manner unheard of hitherto. This is a 
hope. 

Others, less sanguine in their expecta- 
tions, prophesy that the Church will go on 
substantially as it has been going. Human 
nature, they tell us, is not going to be altered 
by the present conilict, and the Gospel of 
Christ is forevermore the same. The revela- 
tion of God in Christ, and the nature of the 
human heart remaining unaltered by the 
war, what reason, men ask, have we to ex- 
pect any revolutionary changes in the 
Christian Church? Let us hope it will be 
in many ways a better and more efficient 
Church, but let us not expect the impossible. 

It is by no means certain that the immedi- 
ate effect on men's attitude to the Church 
will be favourable. It may turn out to be 
bad. It may be that the Church will lose 
heavily in many ways because of this war. 
Accessions to her membership may be 
greatly reduced. A multitude of her pres- 
ent communicants may drop out. She may 
be seriously crippled in various departments 
of her work. Her prestige and glory may 
pass into eclipse. But there is no ground 



124 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

for thinking that the Church will be per- 
manently damaged by the war. She may be 
wounded by the war, but the wounds will 
not prove fatal. The idea that she may 
lose her life in the war is preposterous. The 
gates of Hades shall not prevail against her. 
If she dies, she will rise again. The world 
cannot endure without her. Whatever she 
may lose in passing through the fire, she can 
afford to lose. She will be only refined by 
her sufferings and losses. 

There are several encouraging facts which 
should not be overlooked. When the war 
first broke out, the question was often 
heard: "Why did the Church not prevent 
this?" Men asked one another in scornful 
tones: "Where is the Church?" "What 
has the Church been doing? What is the 
Church for if it cannot ward off a catas- 
trophe like this? " Nobody inquired: Where 
is Science ? The very power which had been 
proclaimed as the coming saviour of the 
world was not so much as thought of by 
anybody in those first dreadful days. No- 
body asked: Where is Education? Where 
are the colleges and the universities? 
Where is Art, and where are all the Artists? 
Where is Philosophy? Where is Reason? 
Where is Common Sense? No one went 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 125 

in pursuit of any other agency or institution 
than the Christian Church. The world was 
disappointed that the Church had not been 
able to do a mighty work. The masses of 
men felt aggrieved because the Church had 
not come up to their expectations. This 
arraignment was a beautiful testimony to 
the faith in the Church of God which lies 
deep rooted in the heart of our Western 
world. Sad and dejected as the two dis- 
ciples who walked toward Emmaus on a 
Sunday evening long ago, men said, we had 
hoped that the Church of Christ was the one 
who was to redeem Israel! Christendom 
assumes that the Church ought to render 
wholesale human slaughter impossible. The 
average man assumes that this is a part of 
the Church's mission. He takes it for 
granted that no other institution is equal to 
a task so gigantic. For all these assump- 
tions we should be glad. The hidden atti- 
tude of the human heart to the Church is, 
even in days of criticism and denunciation, 
one of faiih and hope. 

A second fact to be noted is that as soon 
as Caesar determined to unsheathe the 
sword, he looked to the Church for assist- 
ance. He did this in every land. He 
realized that without the aid of the Church 



126 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

his battalions could not march to victory. 
There are two forces which every belliger- 
ent country has cultivated during the last 
four years with great assiduity — Labour 
and the Christian Church. Our own gov- 
ernment has been specially outspoken in 
confessing its dependence on our churches. 
Washington City knows that however im- 
perfect the Church may be in its organiza- 
tion, and however ineffective it may be in 
some of its work, it nevertheless is one of 
the mightiest forces under heaven for the 
moving of men's hearts and the attainment 
of great ends. The appeals which our gov- 
ernment has made to the ministers of this 
country within the last year for assistance 
in winning the war is a proof that however 
impotent, in the judgment of many critics, 
the pulpit may be, and however negligible 
organized Christianity may be in the 
practical work of our day, nevertheless the 
Christian- Church is not despised by men 
who understand the nation, and who wish to 
mobilize to the utmost our national re- 
sources. It is conceded by those who know 
that a Christian nation cannot win in a great 
war without the whole-hearted sympathy 
and cooperation of the Christian Church. 
A third fact not to be lost sight of is that 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 127 

the government, as soon as it declared war, 
began at once to make use of the methods 
which have been employed by the Church 
from the beginning. The Church has al- 
ways believed in preaching. It has confi- 
dence in the force of words. It relies much 
upon the power of the tongue. IMany dis- 
paraging things have been said in recent 
years about preaching. It has been said 
that the day of vocal triumphs has passed, 
that the power of the tongue has been 
broken. But every nation now at war has 
confessed its belief in the power of the 
tongue. As soon as the United States de- 
clared war, a vast company of speakers were 
sent broadcast to give instructions to the 
people. As in the days of the early Church, 
some of these messengers were apostles, 
ordained by the President himself, some 
were prophets, their main business being to 
interpret the moral aims of the war, some 
were evangelists, their aim being the imme- 
diate conversion of men to the belief that 
ours is a holy war. Some were exhorters. 
They stood on street corners and in public 
halls, and simply exhorted men to enter the 
army or navy. There were divers kinds of 
tongues, and they all proclaimed the same 
message : " The world must be made safe 



128 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

for democracy." Csesar recognized at once 
that the method of the Church is wise, and 
that whatever other agencies may be made 
use of in the winning of modern wars, the 
tongue cannot be dispensed with. This war 
differs from all other wars in many points, 
and one of its most distinguishing character- 
istics is the manifested belief in the power of 
words. Never before have words been used 
in such enormous quantities as in this war. 
Millions of shells have been used, and tens 
of millions of words. The words and the 
shells are counted equally indispensable. 
Every government has carried on a sys- 
tematic and vigorous propaganda. The 
printing presses have been kept running day 
and night, turning out tons of leaflets and 
pamphlets and tracts for the education of 
the people. Words are seen to be as potent 
as shrapnel. The pen can do what the 
sword may be unable to accomplish. The 
tongue can pull down strongholds which lie 
beyond the reach of the howitzers. Two of 
the outstanding victories of Germany in the 
war — the rout of the Italian army and the 
overthrow of Russia — were brought about 
largely by the skillful use of words. Every 
nation now realizes that it cannot win by the 
sword alone. It must use also the tongue 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 1 29 

and the pen. Here then is a recognition of 
the wisdom of Jesus. When He opened His 
compaign for the conquest of the world, He 
sent forth men to preach. He beHeved in 
words. He knew the shattering power of 
ideas. He knew that the most potent of all 
the swords is the sword which a man carries 
in his mouth. Caesar has learned at last that 
words are bullets, and is better able to un- 
derstand Paul's remark that God is going 
to save this world by the foolishness of 
preaching. 

Another feature of the war is the large 
number of public meetings. Caesar believes 
in getting men together. He sees that 
whenever men come together in the name 
of a great cause, a psychical power is gen- 
erated which can be gotten in no other way. 
There has been much skepticism in recent 
years on the efficacy of church meetings. 
Such meetings have often been voted a 
bore; men have claimed that they could 
serve themselves and mankind by reading 
good books in their home without subject- 
ing themselves to the inconvenience of going 
to church. Public worship has been de- 
clared to be unnecessary, and the singing of 
anthems an inherited form of ancient super- 
stition. And then one April day the gov- 



I30 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

ernment decides to engage in a great enter- 
prise, and one of the first things it does is 
to encourage men to assemble themselves 
together. People pass immediately into a 
devotional frame of mind, and they stand 
with reverent hearts while musical instru- 
ments play the Star Spangled Banner. 
Anthems do not seem to be so antiquated 
after all, when great things are to be done. 
Even congregational singing becomes popu- 
lar again. Men full of feeling love to pour 
out their feeling in song. All over the land 
great congregations sing with swelling 
hearts : 

" My country, 'tis of thee, 
Sweet land of liberty, 
Of tliee I sing." 

There seems to be no objection to congre- 
gational singing when the heart is lifted to 
the level of a great ideal. Everybody in war 
time seems to know that it is a good thing 
to sing together, and that it not only gives 
relief to the heart which engages in the sing- 
ing, but likewise increases the volume of 
patriotic emotion in the hearts of the people. 
Patriotism, as well as religion, recognizes 
the place and the power of public assemblies 
and the inspiration and uplift of congrega- 
tional singing. 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 131 

As soon as war was declared everybody 
believed in symbolism. Flags were immedi- 
ately displayed. The streets of all our great 
cities were aflutter with them. The flag 
seemed to express more than it was possible 
to declare either in song or in speech. 
Patriotism loves to appeal to the eye as well 
as to the ear. Every spirit in the soul of 
man is fed by sights and sounds. The 
human heart is naturally fond of symbols. 
But men have been talking in many quarters 
against the foolishness of symbols. They 
have laughed at baptism as a foolish rite, 
and have steadfastly refused to participate 
in a ceremony so meaningless as that of the 
Lord's Supper. Of what value, men have 
asked, can be a few drops of water on the 
head, and of what significance can be a 
crumb of bread and a sip of wine? Such 
questions are asked by those who do not 
understand the power of symbols, and the 
place they have in the evolution of the moral 
life of mankind. But every patriot knows 
the value of a symbol when that symbol 
takes the shape of his nation's flag. It is 
only silk or cotton to the man who does not 
love his country, but to the heart that is 
patriotic that flag ceases to be silk or cotton, 
it becomes the symbol of all that is most 



132 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

glorious in his nation's soul. When a gov- 
ernment girds itself for a mighty task, it 
does precisely what Jesus did — it makes use 
of symbols, something which will appeal to 
the spirit through the senses of the body. 
An invisible patriotism is no patriotism at 
all. Those men who would like to strip re- 
ligion of everything which makes it visible 
and audible and tangible would never allow 
you to strip patriotism of its national an- 
thems and flags, and military processions, 
and all the other insignia of power. 

In time of war, we all believe in organiza- 
tion. We know that the isolated man is 
impotent. It is only when men cooperate 
that they are able to overcome a foe. The 
word corps takes at once a new place in our 
conversation. We talk of the Red Cross 
Corps, and the Hospital Corps, and the 
Medical Corps, and the Signal Corps, and 
the Engineers' Corps, and the Aeroplane 
Corps, and twenty other kinds of Corps — in 
other words, we think and talk in terms of 
social organization. We lose our interest 
in the individual man. We love to think of 
men massed together. We know that with- 
out organization we are helpless. It is 
through organized groups of men that 
patriotism can do its mighty work. Much 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH I33 

has been said for a long time against organi- 
zation in the realm of religion. Some men 
have smiled at it, and others have denounced 
it as a device of the Devil. They have 
scorned all ecclesiastical organization as 
though it were a degradation of the pure 
religion introduced into the world by Jesus 
of Nazareth. They have assumed that re- 
ligion is a purely spiritual thing, and that it 
can exist upon this planet without a body. 
Christianity, to these men, is a set of ideas, 
and these ideas will do their perfect work 
without the assistance of any organization. 
Such men are dreamers! Christianity can- 
not survive in a world like this without a 
Church any more than a man's spirit can 
survive without his body. A patriot knows 
that it is not enough to believe in the idea 
of democracy, and to hold in one's heart a 
hatred of Prussian militarism. These feel- 
ings and ideas are impotent unless you can 
organize men who hold them into an army. 
Nothing but organized strength can over- 
come Potsdam. The man who says he is 
against the Kaiser, but refuses to enlist in 
the army; who asserts he is a friend of the 
United States, but declines to march under 
its flag; who declares he is a patriot, but 
refuses to keep step with the men who are 



134 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

marching to the front, will be put down as a 
slacker, no matter what he may say. It is 
the command of Jesus that all men who be- 
lieve in His principles, and wish to see them 
established in the hearts and homes of men, 
must come out from the crowd, be baptized 
into His name, and march together and fight 
together against the hierarchy of Night. 
This is also the method of Caesar. He 
knows that a rampant individualism is fatal 
to all great achievements, and that it is only 
through the consolidated strengths of vast 
numbers of men, compacted into a vital and 
solid body that great ideals can come to 
their coronation. All the fundamental 
methods of the Christian religion have been 
approved and adopted by the nations en- 
gaged in this war. 

But it is not only the methods, but also 
the principles of the Christian Church which 
the whole world is just now extolling. One 
cannot pick up a paper without reading in 
the editorial columns one or another of the 
commonplaces of the Christian pulpit. For 
instance, we are told every day we must not 
think of convenience or comfort. We must 
put duty first. The man who in time of war 
does not exalt the idea of duty is held up for 
swift reprobation. To win the approbation 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 1 35 

of God and men a man must do his duty. 
That is what the Church has always said. 

The papers say that personal safety is not 
a matter of the first concern. Soldiers can- 
not think of their own personal safety. 
That is unmanly. Soldiers must think only 
of how best they can serve their country. 
All this is clear in time of war. To the 
teachers of religion it is equally clear in time 
of peace. Among true and courageous men 
safety is never first. 

Financial greed, the papers say, is an ugly 
and degrading thing. Men who love money 
more than they love mankind, and who 
sacrifice the interests of the nation in order 
to put money in their purse, are called 
profiteers, and the word is as odious as 
coward, thief, or traitor. A man who puts 
money first when other men are laying down 
their lives for him is despicable. Money 
must never be put first. The man who puts 
it first is a traitor to mankind. The Chris- 
tian Church has proclaimed that from the 
beginning. Even the man in the street 
knows it now. 

We are all under the law of service — so 
say the papers every day. It is our duty to 
help the Belgians, and the Servians, and the 
Poles, and the Armenians and the French. 



136 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

We must bear one another's burdens. The 
preachers have said it all the time; the 
editors are now saying it also. 

We must not rate life too highly. We 
must not fear death. We must keep death 
in its proper place. Physical life is not too 
great a price to pay for noble principles, and 
for the freedom and happiness of human 
homes. The fear of death is an ignoble fear, 
and there are times when men must lay 
down their lives for others. The most 
worldly papers announce these truths as 
axiomatic. The pulpit has proclaimed them 
in season and out of season through nineteen 
hundred years. 

In short, the non-churchgoing, non-believ- 
ing, non-Christian world has come to see in 
these days of war that the fundamental 
principles of the Christian faith are nothing 
more or less than the principles of all 
wholesome and victorious life. The ideas 
of Christianity are being everywhere pro- 
claimed in the language of the shop and the 
street by men who do not realize that they 
are repeating the teaching of the pulpit. 
The law of universal obligation to service, 
and the law of sacrifice are the two laws 
which are to-day proclaimed across the land 
as laws which are binding on all our people, 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 137 

and what are these two laws but the ancient 
moral principles announced by the Hebrew 
prophets, and in the fullness of time revealed 
and enforced in the life and death of Jesus 
Christ? 

This then is significant, that the political 
leaders of the world have come round in this 
crisis of history to subscribe to the cardinal 
principles of the Christian religion, and to 
acknowledge the wisdom of the methods of 
the Christian Church. This will not be for- 
gotten when the war is over, and will make 
it easier for multitudes to confess them- 
selves followers of the Son of God. 

Moreover, the war has helped us to see 
how sorely the world needs an institution 
whose supreme business is feeding the 
springs of good will. There is no doubt as 
to the mission of the Christian Church, Its 
mission is written large across the pages of 
the New Testament. It exists to establish, 
not in some other world but in this one, the 
kingdom of God, which is righteousness and 
peace and joy. Its fundamental doctrine is 
the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood 
of man. Its passionate appeal is: "Love 
one another even as I have loved you." The 
most vivid of its parables is that of the Good 
Samaritan, in which a man of one race ren- 



138 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

ders assistance to a man of another. Chris- 
tian ministers are embassadors of reconcilia- 
tion. They are ordained to bring men closer 
to God, and nearer to one another. Their 
supreme task is building up in men the 
mind of Christ, and the mind of Christ is 
sympathy and forgiveness and love. They 
hold up before men's eyes the image of 
Christ the peacemaker, and their constant 
exhortation is that men may put of¥ the old 
man with his doings, and put on the new- 
man where there cannot be Greek and Jew, 
circumcision or uncircumcision, barbarian, 
Scythian, bondman, freeman : but Christ is 
all and in all. 

Of course the Church has never done its 
work efficiently. Like all human institu- 
tions it is made out of men, and men are 
creatures of many infirmities and limitations. 
The Church of Christ must always be handi- 
capped by the ignorances and prejudices and 
passions of the people who compose it, and 
not until men become perfect can the 
Church ever perform a perfect work. It 
would be absurd to claim that the Church 
has ever at any time performed its full duty, 
or to deny that it has not constantly sinned 
and fallen short of the divine glory. The 
great war has lit up luridly by its flames 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 1 39 

the imperfections and blunderings of the 
Church, and the Church has no disposition 
at the present time to excuse itself or to 
deny its manifold weaknesses and shortcom- 
ings. In the hearts of the most faithful of 
its members there stands the spirit of the 
Publican, scarcely daring to lift its eyes unto 
heaven, and praying again and again — " God 
be merciful to me a sinner! " 

But however incompetent and unworthy 
in times past the Church may have been, 
the war has forced on us the imperative need 
of an institution which shall attempt with 
zeal and power to do what the New Testa- 
ment says the Church of Christ is estab- 
lished to do. We cannot get on without an 
institution whose supreme business it is to 
bind human hearts together, and to make 
war on those sentiments and dispositions 
which drive communities and nations apart. 
We live in a world of many prejudices 
and antipathies. Inherited antagonisms 
and traditional animosities slumber in 
human hearts everywhere. Dangerous fires 
smoulder under the surface of society, ready, 
at almost any moment, to burst into flame. 
The very structure of modern society seems 
to lend itself to the work of pushing men 
apart. The division of labour has driven 



140 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

each man into his own little corner, where 
he is in danger of becoming lost in himself 
and forgetting his brothers. The inequal- 
ities of social condition wear chasms be- 
tween different classes, and across these 
chasms men glare at one another in sus- 
picion and ill will. The principle of compe- 
tition on which our modern civilization is 
built has a tendency to whet the greed of 
men, and to array the strong against the 
weak, and the many against the few. Surely 
we need an institution which shall keep on 
asking: " Have we not all one Father? hath 
not one God created us? " 

In a world in which an exaggerated 
nationalism is playing an increasingly con- 
spicuous part, and in which the various 
nations of our Western world are compet- 
ing with one another in a frenzied effort to 
obtain zones of influence and valuable con- 
cessions in the lands of belated peoples, and 
in which mischief makers of many kinds 
abound, how can humanity hope to survive 
and prosper without an alert and mighty 
Church? There are journalists who make 
a practice of poisoning the wells of inter- 
national good will. There are writers of 
skill and influence who take delight in 
fanning the fires of suspicion and dislike. 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 14I 

Lying rumour and poisonous gossip have 
great opportunities in a world of telegraph 
lines to do their deadly work. A thousand 
forces work day and night to array men 
against one another, and to snap those bonds 
of sympathy and trust without which man- 
kind falls into chaos. 

The war, then, does not prove that the 
Church of Christ is not needed in our 
modern world : it proves we need it desper- 
ately. It demonstrates that we cannot get 
on without it. It calls attention to the fact 
that we must have a better and a stronger 
Church if we are to cope successfully with 
the foes of modern civilization. Instead of 
tossing the Church aside because the world 
has tumbled into a ditch, we must cling to 
the Church with a new devotion, and pour 
into it a fuller measure of our strength and 
love. It is not a lesser Church but a greater 
Church which humanity is crying out for. 
The Church has failed, men say. Very well, 
if it has failed, we must see to it that it never 
fails again. The Church is behind the times, 
we are reminded. If that be true, then it is 
the duty of all men of strength and vision 
to bring the Church up into the forefront of 
the times. The Church is weak, men say; 
its influence is a dwindling one. If that be 



142 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

the case, there is nothing for the lovers of 
mankind to do but to join heads and hands 
in a strenuous effort to make the Church 
what it ought to be. There are certain 
institutions we cannot get on without. The 
family is one of them, the State is the second, 
and the Church is the third. Since these 
are indispensable, we gain nothing by decry- 
ing them. It is the part of wisdom to note 
the points at which they fail, and then use 
all our powers in devising plans by which 
old weaknesses may be eradicated and new 
vitality be imparted. Let us hope that the 
attitude to the Church hereafter may be 
more and more constructive, every man ask- 
ing, not what flaw can I discover, what de- 
fect can I bewail, but what defect can I 
remedy, and what added energy can I 
bestow? Christ loved the Church and gave 
Himself up for it. We ought to follow His 
example. 

We have a right, then, I think, to antici- 
pate a changed attitude to the Church as the 
result of the great war. The new facts are 
lighting up the old truths. The twelfth 
chapter of Paul's first letter to the Corin- 
thians now burns with a new glory, and the 
entire letter to the Ephesians ought to take 
a place it never had before. It may be that 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 143 

no part of Christianity will be modified in 
more particulars by the war than the organi- 
zation and program of the Church, and it is 
not unlikely that on no other doctrine will 
men's ideas undergo such a radical modifica- 
tion as in their conceptions of the Church's 
nature and mission and importance. 

We have a right to expect a changed atti- 
tude on the part of those doleful ministers 
of the Gospel who have found it difficult to 
speak half an hour without giving theology 
a dig, and denominationalism a slap. When 
Roman Catholic prelates want to prove to 
the faithful that Protestantism is a failure 
and disgrace, all that is necessary for them 
to do is to weave together a series of quota- 
tions from the lips of prominent despondent 
Protestant clergymen. Probably one of 
the effects of the war will be an increasing 
reluctance on the part of these clerical critics 
to wash our soiled linen in public. A new 
league has been just now announced — the 
" Lip Service League." It has taken its 
place in the long list of organizations which 
the patriotic spirit of our country has 
recently called into existence. The purpose 
of the league is to put an end to the habit 
of grumbling and faultfinding, and to induce 
all good Americans to talk their government 



144 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

up. Its aim is to get rid of that spirit of 
faint-heartedness which expresses itself in 
lugubrious forebodings, and to inspire men 
to speak in a bolder and more jubilant 
accent. Why should men and women think 
well of America and talk about her in terms 
of appreciation and confidence? They 
should do this because she deserves it, and 
because we ought to tone up public opinion, 
for public opinion in a country like this is 
after all the supreme force which moulds 
the career and character of the nation. 
America cannot do her share in the winning 
of the war unless patriotic Americans be- 
lieve in their country and in their country's 
ability to accomplish the work she has 
started out to do. There are many things 
to be sure which are going poorly, many 
blunders are being committed, and there are 
mistakes not a few, but in time of national 
crisis there is something more important to 
do than to grumble and find fault. It is in 
the atmosphere of hope that nations 
triumph, and it is by faith that demons are 
cast out and dark hierarchies overthrown. 
Generals in the army, who made a practice 
of underestimating and carping at the 
troops under their command, would not be 
tolerated by their government, no, not for 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH I45 

a day, nor should ministers of the Gospel be 
allowed a place in our pulpits who everlast- 
ingly disparage and slander the Christian 
Church, 

The attitude of the pulpit will be altered, 
no doubt, in another particular. The 
preacher will look upon his sermon as a 
call to sacrifice. The pulpit has been on 
the whole too easy in its demands. It has 
not asked enough. It has not dared to drive 
the idea of the cross home. The Govern- 
ment has taught us much at this point. 
The Government has no hesitancy in asking 
for the surrender of everything. It asks and 
expects men to give up not only luxuries 
but comforts, not only conveniences but 
things which have been counted necessities. 
The State dares to ask men to subject them- 
selves to every conceivable discomfort and 
risk, and to lay down even life itself. When 
Cccsar speaks in this tone, he uses the tone 
of Jesus. It was with that note that Jesus 
talked to His disciples. He told them they 
must give up everything, and must not 
hesitate to surrender life itself. He ap- 
pealed to the heroic in man, and whenever 
the heroic is appealed to, men are certain 
to give a response. The pulpit is going to 
shake off its fears. It will dare hereafter 



146 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

to ask for the very largest things. The 
young men of the world have shown what 
they are capable of, and the ministers are 
not going to forget it. There will be a new 
attitude of trust in young men, the like of 
which we have never known before. 

With this changed attitude of the preacher 
to his message and his congregation, there 
will come a changed attitude in his people. 
They will come to think of the Church more 
as an army. That is what it has been from 
the beginning. Paul considered it an army, 
and called the men who laboured with him 
fellow soldiers. He looked upon every 
Christian as a warrior, and urged him to put 
every piece of the prescribed armour on. 
John also looked upon the Church as an 
army, and in the book of the Revelation 
Jesus is pictured as a general on a war 
horse, followed by soldiers dressed in white. 
From the beginning, the Church on earth 
has been called the Church Militant, but too 
often the martial note has been lost, and men 
have been allowed to forget that they are in 
this world for the express purpose of pulling 
down the strongholds of evil. When Chris- 
tians forget that, they go to sleep. A 
church which can find nothing in the town 
to fight is a church which becomes atrophied. 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH I47 

It is only by struggle that any church can 
become strong. The war has breathed into 
us something of the aggressiveness of the 
Apostolic Church, and men now sing with 
heightened ardour: 

" The Son of God goes forth to war, 
A kingly crown to gain." 

When our laymen get to fighting the forms 
of evil in their community they will believe 
more fully in the blessings of pubHc wor- 
ship, and in all the meetings of the Church. 
The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper will 
come to have a deeper meaning. It will be- 
come what it was to the early Roman Chris- 
tians, an oath of loyalty to their commander. 
Church members will believe more enthusi- 
astically in their church, and this enthusiasm 
will have its effect on the attitude of out- 
siders. 

The world outside the Church is learning 
many things. UnbeHevers, as well as 
Christians, are subjected to-day to a serious 
discipline. Men are pondering things in 
their hearts. Men are wondering, meditat- 
ing, asking questions, wrestling with diffi- 
culties as never before. Out of this sweat 
of intellect and turmoil of heart will come 
a harvest to the glory of God. Many men 



148 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

are seeing for the first time that the Church 
is indispensable to the well-being of society. 
The Church's agent— the Y. U. C. A.— is 
bringing Christian hymns and Christian 
prayers and the Christian sacraments to the 
attention of tens of thousands of young men 
who have been thus far indifferent to re- 
ligion. The Y. M. C. A., by ministering to 
the young men of the world, is giving them 
a clear conception of what Christianity 
really means. It is showing them that a 
Christian is a man who for the sake of Christ 
is glad to help his fellows, and that he counts 
his own life as nothing if he can only min- 
ister to the lives of others. There is no 
institution on the face of the earth so 
popular at the present hour as the Y. M. 
C. A. It has written its name on the hearts 
of millions never to be effaced. The service 
gladly rendered by Y. M. C. A. secretaries 
to young men far from home, in their hours 
of loneliness and homesickness, and often 
in hours of pain and suffering, and in many 
cases in the hour of death, is making an im- 
pression on the mind of the present genera- 
tion which will be a force in shaping the 
future. Now the Y. M. C. A. is simply the 
Christian Church, girding itself for a special 
form of service. The secretaries are Chris- 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 149 

tians, members of the Church, the directors 
are Christians, also members of the Church. 
The money is given — most of it — by Chris- 
tians, also members of the Church. It is 
the Church, then, which through the Y. M. 
C. A. is ministering to the young men of 
many lands. It does not labour in vain. It 
is casting its bread upon the waters, and it 
will find it after many days. It is sowing 
seeds, and there will be a harvest later on. 
After the war is over there will be a new 
world of men with a changed attitude to the 
Church of Christ. A part of the change will 
be due, by the grace of God, to the noble and 
self-sacrificing labours of the Y. M. C. A. 

The awakened sense of national great- 
ness and responsibility which the war has 
brought, and the deeper and more fervent 
patriotism which the war has kindled in 
millions of hearts are going to lead to a 
changed attitude to the Church of Christ. 
We now see more clearly the necessity of 
having a united country. We are on the 
stage of the world's life, and we are to re- 
main there to the end of the human drama. 
We cannot play our part successfully unless 
we are a united people. We can never be 
racially one. We are fed from all the coun- 
tries of the globe. Our unity must be 



I50 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

sought, then, in the realm of the spirit. It 
is only in common ideals that all our people 
can come together. A common language 
will help to unify us, and so will our system 
of common school education, but these will 
prove insufhcient unless supplemented by 
the fusing power of religion. Religion is 
the greatest power under heaven for the 
fusing of hearts. Men become one at the 
throne of God, It is when souls bow at the 
name of Christ that racial and political and 
social differences are forgotten, and all come 
to feel they are one. Our love of country 
will help us become better Christians. 

We are seeing more clearly the necessity 
of a united Church. We must have a united 
country, and to get a united country we 
must have a more united Church. We 
Christians must come closer together. 
Shame on us if we dilly-dally any longer. 
We have dwelt too much on our differences, 
and not enough on our agreements. The 
war is forcing us together. It is baptizing 
us into a common grief. It is rolling on us 
a common burden. Men of all denomina- 
tions are camping together, marching to- 
gether, fighting together, suffering together, 
dying together. Women of all denomina- 
tions are knitting together, working to- 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 151 

gether, praying together, weeping together. 
Sectarian animosities are being smothered, 
denominational rivalries are being sub- 
merged. The pressure of this colossal 
tragedy is breaking down the walls of 
separation. The war will surely modify in 
many and wonderful ways the religious 
temper and tone of the country, and will 
change the attitude of millions of Christians 
to church unity and church union, to the 
work of coordinating and consolidating the 
religious forces of the nation. In the 
gigantic task that awaits us of binding up 
the wounds made by the war, men long 
separated are going to join sympathetic 
hands, and hearts long estranged are going 
to flow together. We shall sing as never 
before : 

" Blest be the tie that binds 

Our hearts in Christian love." 

For the first time we are thinking as a 
people of our place among the nations of 
the earth. We have at last the world- 
vision, and are possessed of the international 
mind. We see as never before the problems 
and perils of the coming years. We are 
face to face with tasks more colossal than 
those which any preceding generation ever 



152 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

faced. We have a whole world to plan for 
and direct, to teach and to save. A burden 
is rolled on us which we cannot bear alone. 
When we look out upon the world problems 
we cry in distress : " Who is sufficient for 
these things?" and then the comforting 
thought comes to us: "Our sufficiency is 
from God." He has made a way of escape 
from all our tribulations and perils. He has 
ordained an instrument by which the great 
work is to be accomplished. A new world 
is to be created by the instrumentality of an 
organization baptized into the spirit of 
Jesus and endowed with His might. The 
world is to be redeemed by Christ through 
His Church. The Church is His body. 
The Church is His bride. The Church is 
His temple. The Church is the pillar and 
ground of the truth. The Church is the 
family of God. The Church is the city of 
God. " And the nations shall walk in the 
light thereof; and the kings of the earth do 
bring their glory into it ; and they shall bring 
the glory and the honour of the nations into 
it; and there shall in no wise enter into it 
anything unclean, or he that maketh an 
abomination and a lie : but only they which 
are written in the Lamb's book of life." 
*' There is one body and one spirit, even as 



THE ATTITUDE TO THE CHURCH 1 53 

also ye were called in one hope of your call- 
ing; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one 
God and Father of all, who is over all, and 
through all, and in all." 



LECTURE V 
THE USE OF THE BIBLE 



LECTURE V 

THE USE OF THE BIBLE 

THE great war burns on like a con- 
flagration, and many things are 
being consumed. They are swept 
away on the wind Hke ashes. The Bible 
will remain. Many things are melting and 
flowing into new forms. The shape of the 
Bible will not be altered. Many things are 
losing their colour and luster, but the Bible 
will lose nothing. It is a sort of Daniel. 
The lions cannot tear it. The fires cannot 
burn it. It is beyond the reach even of war. 
No submarine can sink it, no howitzer can 
demolish it, no asphyxiating gas can smother 
it. It is on the earth, and yet it is where 
neither moth nor rust consumes, and where 
thieves do not break through and steal. At 
the end of the war, the Bible will still con- 
tain sixty-six books; not one chapter will be 
missing, or one sentence erased. You can 
no more burn up the Bible than you can 
burn up the Milky Way. But there is rea- 
son to think that the use of the Bible will in 
many quarters be modified. Many Chris- 
157 



158 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

tians will read it from a new view-point. 
Because of the altered method of reading it, 
fresh light will break forth from it to guide 
humanity on its way. 

The war has given us two solemnizing 
revelations concerning the Scriptures. First, 
it has shown us that multitudes of young 
men even from Christian homes know little 
of the Bible. We knew it before — we know 
it better now. The religious leaders of 
Great Britain have been appalled by dis- 
coveries they have made. They have found 
out what a slight hold the Bible has on the 
average Britisher, and what little progress 
he has made in the understanding of it. 
But this revelation is scarcely more startling 
than the discovery that many religious 
teachers do not know how to use the Bible. 
Christian ministers of reputation, and even 
learned doctors of divinity, have in many 
cases given the most surprising exhibitions 
of their ignorance of the Scriptures, and 
have used the Holy Writings in ways for 
which there is no justification. One cannot 
help wondering if the reason why so many 
young men are not interested in the Bible is 
because their pastors have held belated con- 
ceptions of it, and have persisted in using it 
in antequated and irrational ways. 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 159 

Everything depends on the way in which 
a book is used. A good book may be used 
in ways which produce bad results. Even 
the Bible may be so interpreted and applied 
as to retard the progress of mankind. No 
book in all the world has been so persistently 
and flagrantly misused as the Bible. This 
misuse began early, and has been continued 
down to our own day. It matters little how 
earnest or how honest a man may be, if he 
perverts the Scriptures and tortures them 
into teaching things which are not true or 
right, he damages the reputation of the Holy 
Volume, and handicaps the Church in all its 
work. Nothing, perhaps, has so plagued 
and crippled the cause of Christ through 
1,900 years as false conceptions and mis- 
taken interpretations of the Bible. One of 
the blessings which we have a right to ex- 
pect the war to confer upon the world is the 
breaking of the grip on many minds of a 
false theory of the Bible, and the banishing 
of certain methods of interpretation which 
have harassed and hampered us through 
many generations. 

No matter what may be the subject of 
controversy, the Bible is certain, soon or 
late, to be dragged into it. This is inevi- 
table. Christians, believing that in the 



l6o 01 D TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

Bible they have a message from God, natu- 
rally search the Scriptures for sentences 
which seem to support the position they are 
trying to maintain. Agnostics and un- 
believers are also glad to quote the Scrip- 
tures w^hen they can, because the Bible is 
a book of vast prestige, and a man adds 
weight to his argument by weaving into it 
the apparent approval of some prophet or 
apostle. The Bible is often quoted by men 
who have no interest in the Christian re- 
ligion. They quote the Bible just as they 
quote Shakespeare and Browning. It adds 
distinction to a man's cause to link it up 
with a lustrous name. And so in every dis- 
cussion on themes of vital moment, the Bible 
is sure to be quoted by the disputants on 
both sides. In the astronomical controversy 
of the sixteenth century, in the political con- 
troversy of the seventeenth, in the witch- 
craft controversy in the eighteenth, and in 
all the controversies of the nineteenth, in- 
cluding the use of anaesthetics, the practice 
of vaccination, the use of lightning rods, the 
scheme of life insurance, the cause of pro- 
hibition, the right of women to speak in 
church, and the ethics of holding black men 
in slavery, the Bible was used as an arsenal 
of ammunition by both sides. And what 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE l6l 

went on in all preceding centuries goes on 
in our own. The suffragists and the anti- 
suffragists, the vivisectionists and the anti- 
vivisectionists, the socialists and the indi- 
vidualists, the militarists and the pacifists all 
have no difficulty in bolstering up their 
respective positions by quotations from the 
Bible. It is as true to-day as it was when 
Shakespeare said it: 

" What damned error but some sober brow 
Will bless it, and approve it with a text." 

Several months ago a man in Kansas pro- 
pounded the question : Does the Bible sanc- 
tion war? Not long afterward, a conscien- 
tious objector in the city of Brooklyn was 
turned down by the Examining Board of 
that city, the chairman writing on the back 
of the petition handed in by the conscien- 
tious objector this sentence from the fourth 
chapter of the Book of Nehemiah : " Re- 
member the Lord who is great and terrible, 
and fight for your brethren, your sons and 
your daughters, your wives and your 
houses." At this point the discussion was 
taken up by a New York journalist who in 
an editorial referred with glee to the action 
of the Brooklyn judge, and commended his 
clever quotation from the Bible as a full and 



l62 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

sufficient answer to the question propounded 
by the man in Kansas. The Brooklyn judge 
and the New York editor are referred to 
here solely because they are representatives 
of a large class of intelligent people to be 
found in every community. Many min- 
isters and church officials would have done 
the same. These men assume that you can 
answer a deep moral question like that pro- 
pounded by the Kansas man by dipping into 
the Bible anywhere and pulling out a sen- 
tence which seems to contain the answer 
you want to give. They make no distinc- 
tion between what the Bible teaches, and 
what is said in the Bible. That is a fatal 
piece of carelessness. The Bible does not 
teach everything that is said in the Bible, 
any more than Shakespeare teaches every- 
thing which is said in the plays of Shake- 
speare. There are a great company of 
speakers in the Bible, of all stripes and 
grades of ethical development, including the 
devil himself, and we must be careful lest 
in our effort to get the Bible on our side we 
make use of a method which may finally 
bring us to confusion and shame. Does the 
Bible sanction polygamy? The Patriarchs 
were all polygamists, and they seemed to be 
on intimate terms with the Almighty. If 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 1 63 

God ever told them they were committing 
a sin by having more than one wife that 
communication is not recorded. David is 
said to have been a man after God's own 
heart, and he had wives and concubines. 
It would seem, then, that there can be noth- 
ing immoral in concubinage. The leaders 
of the Latter Day Saints quote the Scrip- 
tures precisely after the fashion of the 
Brooklyn judge and the New York editor. 

Does the Bible sanction slavery? Here 
is your answer in unmistakable terms 
written out for you in the twenty-fifth chap- 
ter of Leviticus: "Both thy bond men and 
thy bond maids which thou shalt have, shall 
be of the heathen round about you; of them 
shall ye buy bond men and bond maids. 
Moreover of the children of the strangers 
that do sojourn among you, of them shall 
ye buy, and of their families that are with 
you, which they begat in your land, and they 
shall be your possession. And ye shall take 
them as an inheritance for your children 
after you, to inherit them for a possession : 
they shall be your bond men forever." The 
slaveholders of a generation ago quoted the 
Bible after the manner of the New York 
editor and the Brooklyn judge. 

Does the Bible encourage men to drown 



1 64 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

their sorrow in drink? It would seem so, 
for this is plainly written in the thirty-first 
chapter of the Book of Proverbs, a book 
which preserves the concentrated essence of 
Hebrew practical wisdom : " Give strong 
drink unto him that is ready to perish, and 
wine to those that be of heavy hearts. Let 
him drink and forget his poverty, and 
remember his misery no more." All the 
apologists for the liquor traffic, and all the 
defenders of the guzzling of rum, quote the 
Bible after the style of the Brooklyn judge 
and the New York editor. 

Does the Bible teach that death ends all? 
Hear what is said in the third chapter of the 
Book of Ecclesiastes : " That which befalleth 
the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one 
thing befalleth them ; as the one dieth so 
dieth the other; yea, they have all one 
breath; so that a man hath no preeminence 
above a beast. All go unto one place; all 
are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." 
The cynics who scoff at immortality, and 
who look forward to an eternal sleep, quote 
the Bible after the mode of the New York 
editor and the Brooklyn judge. 

Does the Bible sanction persecution? 
Elijah was one of the greatest of the 
prophets, so great that his countrymen re- 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 165 

fused to believe that he could die, and loved 
to think that he ascended into heaven in a 
chariot of fire, so great that the early Chris- 
tians clung to the report that he and Moses 
had communed with Christ on the Mount of 
Transfiguration. Now in the eighteenth 
chapter of the First Book of Kings, we are 
told that Elijah said this : " Take the 
prophets of Baal: let not one of them 
escape. And they took them : and Elijah 
brought them down to the brook Kishon, 
and slew them there." Many of the perse- 
cutors in Christian history, the pitiless 
judges and executioners of the Inquisition, 
the cruel bigots and the wild fanatics of 
many lands, have quoted the Bible after the 
method of the Brooklyn judge and the New 
York editor. 

Does the Bible believe in witchcraft, and 
does it sanction the execution of witches? 
Here is your answer in the twenty-second 
chapter of the Book of Exodus: "Thou 
shalt not suffer a witch to live." The men 
who did to death a hundred thousand human 
beings in the seventeenth century on the 
charge of witchcraft kept the Bible open at 
the Book of Exodus. They quoted the 
Scriptures after the way of the New York 
editor and the Brooklyn judge. 



l66 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

Does the Bible sanction the doctrine of 
mihtary frightfuhiess? Read what is writ- 
ten in the fifteenth chapter of the First 
Book of Samuel: "Thus saith the Lord of 
Hosts, now go and smite Amalek, and 
utterly destroy all that they have, and spare 
them not; but slay both man and woman, 
infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel 
and ass." Saul refused to carry out the fear- 
ful command. " Then came the word of 
the Lord unto Samuel, saying, It repenteth 
me that I have set up Saul to be king, for 
he hath not performed my commandments." 
And what Saul refused to do, Samuel did. 
" He hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord 
in Gilgal." All the advocates of military 
frightfulness from Attila the Hun down to 
the military staf¥ of Potsdam have quoted 
the Bible after the pattern of the Brooklyn 
judge and the New York editor. 

Does the Bible sanction war? Of course 
it does, if by that you mean, Does any one 
of the men who wrote the Bible throw his 
approbation round the slaughter of the 
battle-field? In the Book of Exodus it is 
plainly stated that God Himself is a man of 
war, and in the Psalter we hear the exultant 
shout of an unknown warrior praising God 
because He has taught his hands to make 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 167 

war, and trained his fingers to fight. All 
the devotees of INIars in Christian lands, 
from the first military butcher down to 
Bcrnhardi, have known how to quote the 
Scriptures after the method of the New 
York editor and the Brooklyn judge. 

It is this manner of using the Bible which, 
let us hope, the great war will forever dis- 
credit. It has tormented and disgraced us 
long enough. It was when Goldwin Smith 
saw the slave dealers using the Bible in 
defense of slavery that he wrote his fiery 
pamphlet in which he declared that the Old 
Testament is a millstone around the neck of 
the Church, and that the Church must get 
rid of it, if it is not to be overwhelmed. 
Even so calm and self-restrained a writer as 
George Adam Smith does not hesitate to 
say that it is an open question whether the 
brutal and superstitious ideas and practices 
of the earlier books of the Old Testament 
have not had a greater influence on the 
civilization of Europe than the masterpieces 
of high thinking and feeling in the Books of 
the Prophets. Right onward through the 
generations this reckless and erroneous use 
of Scripture has been perpetrated on the 
world, and men of vision and of heart have 
cried out in pain : " O wretched men that 



1 68 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

we are, who shall deliver us from the body 
of this death?" 

It was in the nineteenth century that his- 
torical criticism brought relief by applying 
the idea of development to the Scriptures. 
We were in slavery to a theory. The theory 
was that the Bible is a single book, a 
dictated book, equally authoritative in all 
its parts. The Bible, it was said, is the 
word of God, and since it is the word of 
God, it must be perfect like God Himself. 
It must be infallible in all its teaching, it 
must be inerrant in all its statements, it must 
be binding on all generations. This is the 
theory which has been held by many in- 
fluential ecclesiastical leaders through the 
last four hundred years. Early in the nine- 
teenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
declared that the generality of the popular 
divines in Great Britain held that " all parts 
of the Bible are equally inerrant because 
equally dictated by the Supreme Being to a 
mechanical amanuensis." 

This is the theory which still lingers in 
the popular mind, and against which the 
historical scholarship of our day wages un- 
compromising war. Modern scholarship 
has made it clear that the Bible is not one 
book, but many books, sixty-six books, a 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 169 

library, bound together in one volume, to 
be rightly understood only as its varied and 
miscellaneous character is remembered. It 
is not the word of God in its every part. 
The word of God is in the Bible, but the 
Bible itself is not the word of God. The 
Bible is a lantern. There is a light in the 
lantern, but the framework of the lantern is 
not light. Christ is the word of God. " In 
the beginning was the word, and the word 
waTwith God, and the word was God." 

" O word of God incarnate, 
O wisdom from on high 
O Truth unchanged, unchanging 
O Light of our dark sky." 

In Christ there is no blemish, in Him there 
is no darkness at all. He is as a Southern 
poet says— the " Crystal Christ." But the 
Bible is not free from imperfections. It is 
the historical record of the religious develop- 
ment of a singularly gifted people. Like all 
other peoples they rose " on stepping stones 
of their dead selves to higher things." Light 
came to them, as to all mortals, gradually. 
Their greatest and best men were not per- 
fect either in life or thought. Their 
standards were not ideal, their moral judg- 
ments were not in every case sound. These 



lyo OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

men were human. They made mistakes. 
They saw through a glass darkly. They 
erred often in trying to read the future : they 
erred sometimes in interpreting the present. 
They occasionally mistook their own desires 
for the will of God. They sometimes read 
into Deity their own passionate and selfish 
nature. What seemed to them a " thus 
saith the Lord " was sometimes only an echo 
of their own carnal heart. Now the Old 
Testament is the literary record of the 
spiritual evolution of this oriental nation. 
It is the sifted literature of more than a 
thousand years. In such a collection of 
writings one would expect to find just what 
we do find, imperfections, immaturities, con- 
tradictions, here and there an error. Dif- 
ferent grades of mind are represented, dif- 
ferent degrees of spiritual vision. These 
books are not all on the same level. They 
are not of equal value. Their authors are 
of divers religious culture, and they speak 
to us with varying notes of authority. 
There are threads of barbarism woven into 
the wondrous fabric, echoes here and there 
from a savage world. Jesus loved the Old 
Testament, but He read it with discrimina- 
tion. He said to His countrymen : " It 
was said to them of old time, thus and thus, 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE I7I 

but I say unto you, this and this. I assure 
you that on certain points those men of 
former times were mistaken, that in various 
matters they missed the way, that in some 
of their principles they were wrong, and I 
have come to proclaim to you the perfect 
truth." We Christians are followers of 
Jesus, and nothing in the Old Testament is 
of authority to us which falls below the level 
of His teaching. All the books of the Old 
Testament stand before the judgment seat 
of Christ to render an account of the things 
done in their body. Everything that falls 
below the level of His ideas is for us 
obsolete. Anything which contradicts His 
teaching has no binding force on us. " We 
needs must love the highest when we see 
it." Jesus is the highest we have seen. 
Jesus is, therefore, our Master. 

All this has been set forth in many vol- 
umes by modern scholarship, and these con- 
clusions have been accepted by most of the 
people who think and read and know. But 
the pulpit, on the whole, has not yet made 
these things clear to the laity. The general 
public does not know them. The average 
Christian does not know them. The pulpit 
has not clearly and boldly repudiated the 
seventeenth century conception of the Bible; 



172 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

and multitudes of people imagine that the 
Christian Church is committed to the 
doctrine of verbal inspiration, and an in- 
errant text. There are many conservative 
Christians who are reluctant to surrender 
inherited ideas, no matter how false and 
foolish those ideas are, and there are not a 
few ministers who keep silent upon matters 
on which it is imperative that they should 
speak. One of the outstanding scandals of 
this war is the reckless and unscrupulous 
way in which the Bible has been quoted by 
men who ought to have known better. In 
our own country many a minister has by his 
use of Scriptural Cjuotations forever dis- 
credited himself as a safe interpreter of the 
Bible. Doctors of Divinity who have 
framed an argument for war by weaving 
together sentences from the Books of Joshua 
and Judges, Chronicles and Kings, have put 
a stain on their intellectual reputation which 
will never be washed out. It is simply 
scandalous for a Christian minister in the 
twentieth century to attempt to justify war 
as a method of settling international dis- 
putes by isolated sentences torn here and 
there from writings nearly three thousand 
years old. By such a method you can prove 
anything you wish. This was the method 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 1 73 

of the Inquisition, and the method of the 
Defenders of Despotism, and the method of 
the slaveholders, and the method of Paul 
Kruger, and the method of all the fanatics 
and tyrants who have attempted to forge 
chains around the souls of men. It is the 
present method of the Kaiser, of Von Hin- 
denburg, and of all the whole brood of 
sycophant German pastors who are dis- 
gracing themselves and the Church of God 
by their disgusting attempts to justify the 
atrocities of the German military stafif by 
sentences from Holy Writ. The fact that 
German professors and pastors can make 
use of the Bible in defending the in- 
human and unpardonable crimes of Ger- 
many against mankind is going to arouse 
multitudes who have hitherto been in- 
different to the questions of Biblical criti- 
cism, to the cardinal importance of finding 
out what the Bible really is, and what it is 
that this Book actually teaches. Certainly 
there must be something radically wrong 
with the traditional use of the Book when 
it can be prostituted to support ambitions 
and practices which might cause even a 
savage to blush. The prattling of the 
Kaiser about " Gott," a God unknown to the 
New Testament, has made religion odious 



174 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

to multitudes, and has forced us to face the 
necessity of recognizing the hmitations of 
many Old Testament conceptions, and of 
using a discrimination in Bible reading 
which has been too often lacking. Any 
view of the Bible which renders it possible 
to make use of it for the vindication of the 
rapacity of the Pan-Germanists, and the 
justification of the doctrine of military 
frightfulness, is a perilous conception, para- 
lyzing to the Church and deadly to humanity, 
and one which must be rooted out of the 
human mind as speedily as possible by the 
ordained teachers of the Christian religion. 
Those American preachers who justify war 
by quoting scattered sentences from ancient 
Hebrew historians play into the hands of 
the German pulpit sophists, who to-day de- 
fend the sinking of the Litsilojiia, and the 
rape and massacre of women and children 
in Belgium and France by the alleged orders 
of Jehovah to the ancient Israelites to 
annihilate the entire population of Canaan- 
itish cities down to the babies at their 
mothers' breasts. The war will join hands 
with modern historical scholarship in driv- 
ing from the world forever — let us hope — a 
conception of the Bible which has held 
sway over the human mind through many 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 1 75 

dreary centuries, and which has worked 
confusion and havoc and unspeakable 
tragedy all the way. 

What are we to say then to the question : 
Does the Bible sanction war? The answer 
is that the New Testament has nothing 
whatever to say on the subject, and that the 
Old Testament speaks with conflicting 
voices. In the lower parts of the Old Testa- 
ment war is accepted as a part of the divine 
plan— God Himself is a colossal warrior — 
and practices are condoned and even com- 
mended at which our heart revolts. But in 
the higher regions of the Old Testament 
war is abhorred. Many of the Hebrew 
poets record their scorn of military para- 
phernalia. For instance : " There is no king 
saved by the multitude of a host. A horse 
is a vain thing for safety." Or again : " He 
delighteth not in the strength of the horse." 
Horse in the Old Testament means, as you 
know, war horse, and whenever you find an 
Old Testament writer sneering at a horse, 
he is doing it because the horse is the symbol 
of war. None of the prophets is enamoured 
of the pomp and circumstance of war. They 
all view it with detestation, and look for- 
ward to the time when it shall curse the 
world no more. Hosea — a prophet dear to 



176 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

Jesus' heart — told his countrymen that God 
would save them, but not by bow nor by 
sword, nor by battle, by horses nor by 
horsemen. The greatest of the prophets — 
Isaiah — warned his fellow citizens against 
the folly of building their hopes on military 
equipment, and of supposing that a nation 
strongly defended by arms is secure. To 
Isaiah there is no glory in war. It is a 
grizzly intruder, by and by to be cast out. 
He loved to dream of the day when the 
boots of war and the garments rolled in 
blood will be tossed into a glorious bonfire, 
and he felt certain that a time will some day 
come when the instruments of human 
slaughter will be transmuted into the imple- 
ments of industry, and nations will refuse to 
lift up sword against one another, and will 
cease to squander time and money on the 
demoralizing preparations for killing men. 
Can, then, Nehemiah answer a conscien- 
tious objector of the twentieth century? 
Certainly not. Nehemiah was a good man, 
and a brave one, and there was no doubt in 
his mind that if his countrymen were to 
complete the task of rebuilding Jerusalem, 
there was nothing for them to do but fight. 
There is no ground for thinking he was mis- 
taken. But if you can prove by quoting 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 1 77 

Nehemiah that a conscientious objector in 
the twentieth century is wrong, then by the 
same method you can prove that the Prus- 
sian poHcy of miUtary {rightfulness is right. 
The early Israelites did exactly what certain 
German armies have done. The soldiers 
butchered the old people and kept the girls 
for themselves. They did it, it is written, 
under orders from God. This quoting of 
Scripture is a hazardous business. The 
Bible is a two-edged sword, and a man will 
cut his own fingers who does not know how 
to use it. All that we can say about 
Nehemiah is that in the fifth century before 
the Christian era there came a crisis in the 
history of his people in which, so far as he 
could see, the only thing to do was to fight. 
And fight he did. I do not condemn him. 
I do not question the wisdom of his action. 
All I claim is that his decision is not a law 
for us. 

We also are living in great days. A 
crisis has come for this Republic. The 
question arose — Shall we fight? It was 
decided that we should and would. There 
was no consulting of a book. This world is 
not guided by a book. It is guided by the 
Living God. Men cannot in the twentieth 
century, in order to ascertain their duty, 



178 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

turn back to find out what somebody did in 
entirely different circumstance twenty-five 
hundred years ago. We follow the voice of 
God as He speaks in our reason and our 
conscience. God has access to all hearts. 
He is as near to us as He was to the 
Hebrews in the olden times. He is the 
same yesterday, to-day and forever. He is 
with us always even unto the end of the 
world. We are justified in feeling that it 
was right for the United States to go into 
the great world war, not because of anything 
said in the Old Testament, or anything done 
by the ancient Jews, but because in the mind 
of President Woodrow Wilson, and in the 
minds of the members of his Cabinet, and of 
the members of both Houses of Congress — 
the most fully informed men in the coun- 
try — it was made clear that the time had 
arrived when we as a nation could not in 
justice to ourself, and in fidelity to the in- 
terests of mankind, any longer hold aloof. 
We have been promised the guidance of the 
Holy Spirit. If at so momentous a crisis in 
human history it was not possible for us to 
get any guidance from heaven, except what 
little might trickle through a few sentences 
written in a book many centuries ago, then 
the fundamental promise of the Christian 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 1 79 

religion is without value, and we are really 
without God and without hope in the world. 
It is an intolerable thought that God spoke 
to men twenty-five hundred years ago, but 
is either unwilling or unable to speak to 
anybody now. The proper thing to say to 
a conscientious objector is not a quotation 
from the Book of Nehemiah, but a few sen- 
tences from the lips of Woodrow Wilson. 
He is our leader, and we have a right to 
expect God to speak to us through him. 

If, then, it is not proper to seize upon 
isolated sentences in the Old Testament and 
convert them into laws for our action at the 
present time, what shall we do with the 
New Testament? Is it legitimate to quote 
Peter or John or Paul? Is it proper to 
quote our Lord? It is right to quote Jesus 
and the Apostles on any subject on which 
they have expressed a clear-cut and definite 
conclusion, although the Apostles said sun- 
dry things which have no binding force on 
us. But no one of them— so far as we 
l^now — ever expressed himself about war. 
War does not seem to have come within the 
circle of our Lord's immediate concern. He 
spoke on many subjects, but so far as He 
has been reported. He never took up the 
question of international conflict. We do 



l8o OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

not know what He thought about it for that 
century, and even if we knew His judgment 
for that time, we should still have to find out 
His judgment for us, for " new occasions 
teach new duties, time makes ancient good 
uncouth." The Apostles followed the ex- 
ample of their Master in leaving slavery and 
war alone. They were twin abominations 
of the ancient world, and Jesus and His 
Apostles kept their fingers off both of 
them. 

When, therefore, a militarist or a pacifist 
wishes to support his argument by quota- 
tions from the New Testament, he should 
be careful to deal fairly with what is written 
there. The reckless way in which good men 
sometimes deal with Scripture is dishearten- 
ing. They seem to forget that the New 
Testament is literature, and that, like every 
other piece of literature, it must be read in 
obedience to established laws. When we 
use a sentence from a Gospel or an Epistle, 
we must pay attention to the laws of 
grammar and of rhetoric. We must remem- 
ber that the meanings of words are subtle 
and changing, and that the content of a sen- 
tence is conditioned by what goes before 
and what comes after. To pick up a sentence 
as though it were a verbal Melchizedek 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE l8l 

without ancestors or descendants, and make 
use of it in a scheme which we wish to carry 
out, is a dishonest trick with language. 
The significance of every text is conditioned 
by its context — the areas of language by 
which it is surrounded. The New Testa- 
ment is not a book of isolated oracles lying- 
like so many gems or marbles in a box, into 
which box a man can dip his hand, and pick- 
ing up whatever sentence he happens to 
light on, find in it an argument for or a 
demonstration of the point he wants to 
prove. A man of sensitive conscience will 
not play fast and loose with words, especially 
with the words of Jesus. And yet that is 
what many intelligent and honourable men 
under the stress of the hour sometimes do. 
The pacifist of a certain type seizes, for in- 
stance, upon the phrase: "Resist not him 
that is evil," and on that slender foundation 
proceeds to build an elaborate argument to 
prove that the Christian religion does not 
allow a state to make use of force in resist- 
ing encroachments upon its rights. But 
this is only one sentence in one of the Gos- 
pels, and it is sheer caprice to seize upon 
this one sentence and contend that it is the 
very foundation and core of the Christian 
religion. There are many other sentences 



1 82 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

of Jesus equally important, and all of these 
must be taken together, if we are to find out 
what the trend of Christian teaching really 
is. This particular sentence must be in- 
terpreted with a view to the sentences which 
precede and follow it, and a literalism can-- 
not be allowed in the interpretation of this 
sentence which we rule out when it comes 
to interpreting a sentence like this: "Give 
to him that asketh thee, and from him that 
would borrow of thee turn not thou away." 
Jesus had a way of throwing His ideas into 
striking verbal forms, and He trusted men 
to use their intellect in an honest effort to 
ascertain the truth which lay half hidden in 
His words. The man who wishes to estab- 
lish the contention that Jesus of Nazareth 
preached the doctrine of non-resistance as 
that doctrine is understood by groups of 
men who now proclaim it, must produce 
more abundant and more satisfying proof 
than is contained in the few short words: 
" Resist not him that is evil." Always be- 
ware of the man who attempts to establish 
a truth, which he considers absolutely indis- 
pensable for the salvation of the world, upon 
a solitary sentence, the meaning of which is 
not altogether clear to anybody. 

Possibly no sentence of the New Testa- 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 183 

ment has been so often quoted since the war 
began as the words of Jesus: "Think not 
that I came to send peace on the earth: I 
came not to send peace but a sword." This 
has been used to prove that Jesus was not a 
pacifist, and that war is a part of the divine 
scheme, and that huge mihtary prepara- 
tions in time of peace are necessary, and 
that war as a human discipUne will never be 
outgrown, and that universal conscription 
is indispensable to national health, and that 
war is God's tonic which He administers to 
nations which are becoming anaemic, and 
that we are justified in fighting Germany at 
the present time. It is used on all occasions, 
and for all purposes, and by all sorts of 
speakers. Even editors use it. The aver- 
age man who quotes it pays no attention to 
the chapter out of which he got it. He 
knows the meaning of one word in it — 
" sword " — and knowing this he proceeds to 
build the sentence into his argument. 

In order to grasp the meaning of the 
words we must first ascertain what our Lord 
was talking about, and to whom He was 
talking. He was sending twelve young men 
out to preach, and before they started He 
gave them a charge. He told them that 
they were to go out as so many sheep in the 



1 84 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

midst of wolves. Every one of the twelve 
understood what that meant, for every man 
of them had been brought up among sheep, 
and every man of them had heard the howl 
of a wolf and had seen the flash of his teeth. 
Every man of them understood what a wolf 
does to sheep, and also what happens to a 
sheep when a wolf comes near him. To 
make His meaning absolutely clear, He 
went on to say : '' I want you to be harmless 
as doves." With a sheep and a dove before 
their eyes as symbols of what they were to 
be, He felt sure they would not go astray. 
He does not hold back from them the un- 
pleasant truth that some of them will be 
killed. He tells them not to be afraid of 
death. That is a price which a man ought 
to be willing to pay in an effort to make the 
world better. Of course all this comes to 
them with a shock of surprise. They had 
long looked forward to the setting up of the 
Messianic Kingdom, and they had dreamed 
of the high positions which they would fill, 
and of the peace and prosperity which would 
immediately follow the advent of the King. 
Jesus warns them against such rosy and 
jubilant expectations. " Do not think," He 
says, " that you are going to do your work 
in tranquillity. Do not imagine that the 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 185 

world is going to roll at once into a great 
calm. Do not dream that men are going to 
accept these higher standards without pro- 
test, or that they will surrender to these 
heavenly principles without resistance. If 
you preach high ideals you will stir up oppo- 
sition. If you force home the truth you will 
get yourselves into trouble. Wherever you 
go with my ideas, you will create dissen- 
sions and divisions. Communities will be 
thrown into tumult, and even families will 
often be rent in twain. But you must put 
your devotion to me above that to every- 
body else. No man is fit to be counted a 
follower of mine unless he is willing to pay 
the supreme price. If you do not take your 
cross and follow after me, you are not 
worthy of me." 

This is good sensible teaching. It has 
been tested through sixty generations and 
all the world is agreed that the doctrine is 
wholesome. A teacher of religion must not 
fight. He ought to be wise, but he must 
be harmless. He may be insulted, but he 
ought not to retaliate. He may be lied 
about, but he ought not to breathe revenge. 
He may be struck, but he ought not to strike 
back. He may be scratched and torn, pos- 
sibly bitten, but he must not scratch or tear 



1 86 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

or bite. Why not? Because he is a teacher 
of good will. He is an embassador of 
patience. He is a minister of compassion. 
He is a herald of love. And since this is 
the burden of his message, he must show all 
these things in his life. If he becomes 
vindictive and bitter, his message loses its 
force. If he meets violence with violence, 
his usefulness will be snuffed out in a brawl. 
No matter how numerous and furious the 
wolves, he must remain a sheep. No matter 
how hungry the birds of prey, he must con- 
tinue a dove. Jesus counted this funda- 
mental in teachers of His religion, and so 
do we. We do not allow ministers of the 
Gospel to fight. If they do, they are dis- 
missed. We do not permit Christian 
teachers to carry bowie knives or clubs. 
Their only armour must be their beautiful 
spirit. It is not allowed missionaries to 
land on a foreign shore with a machine gun 
or a supply of hand grenades. We expect 
them to go unarmed. We know that some 
of them may suffer many things, a few of 
them may lose their lives, but this does not 
cause us to alter our policy. We carry out 
the program along the lines which our Lord 
at the beginning laid down. Christian min- 
isters and teachers, whether at home or 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 187 

abroad, must never be wolves. They must 
be content to be sheep and doves. 

What then has this sentence to do with 
war? Nothing at all. Jesus is not dis- 
cussing war. He is not giving a lecture on 
statecraft, or on the functions of prime min- 
isters and diplomats. He is not thinking of 
international relationships, or of the com- 
plications which may arise between rival 
states. All these matters He passes over 
to devote His attention to the men who are 
to carry His good tidings to the end of the 
world. 

Non-resistants in search of a bolster- 
ing text might be excused for seizing upon 
a sentence like this as pointing in the direc- 
tion in which they wish the world would go, 
but non-resistants never use this. Strange 
to say, it is used always by militarists and 
by the apologists for war. And yet it is 
one of the sentences which a militarist ought 
to keep far away from. The sentence does 
not refer to the political world, and it does 
not look in the direction of international 
strifes, and therefore we have no right to 
drag it out of the sphere in which it belongs 
into the kingdom of state policy and pro- 
gram, but if you do insist on making this a 
principle of action in every department of 



1 88 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

life, individual and social and industrial, and 
political, and national, and international, 
then you have a wholesale and positive con- 
demnation of war. If you insist that this 
sentence prescribes a course of action for 
statesmen and kings, then you make Christ 
say that a nation must be a sheep, a Chris- 
tian nation must be a dove, a nation worthy 
of Him must never strike back, must never 
use violence, must always submit, must 
allow itself, if called upon, to be chewed up 
by the wolves ! It is amazing that any man 
who wishes to defend war should ever make 
mention of a sentence like that. 

But does our Lord in this charge to the 
Apostles condemn war? I think not. 
Jesus is not discussing political affairs. He 
is giving advice to Christian preachers, and 
there is no parallelism between a Christian 
preacher and a state. The business of a 
preacher is to proclaim by voice and life the 
spirit of gentleness and love; the business of 
a state is to safeguard the life and the prop- 
erty, and the liberties of its people. To say 
that a state, if true to Christ, must never do 
anything which it would not be right for a 
Christian minister to do, is in my judgment 
the very climax of absurdity. Jesus is not 
discussing the subject of war at all. The 



THE USE OF THE BIBLE 189 

New Testament has nothing directly to say- 
on that subject. Where then shall we find 
out what to do? We must go to God ! He 
is the living God. He is a guiding God. 
He gives wisdom to those who ask for it, 
and does not upbraid those who ask. He 
gives His spirit to lead men into whatever 
truth it is needful for them to know. We 
are not dependent on some one afar off who 
will tell us in the hour of crisis what we are 
to think or say or do. It is told us in that 
hour by Somebody inside of us what we are 
to do. When we saw Germany trample 
Belgium under her brutal and bloody feet, 
and discovered later on that Great Britain 
and France, unassisted, were unable to drive 
the monster back, then it was told us in that 
hour what we ought to do. We were not 
dependent on a book. We got our direc- 
tions straight from God. And this is the 
ancient promise ever more fulfilled. The 
Holy Spirit points out the path our feet 
shall travel, and gives us strength sufficient 
to bear the burden and complete the task. 

This, then, is what the war is doing for all 
open-minded Christians around the world. 
It is showing us more clearly what the Bible 
is. It is admonishing us that we must read 
the Scriptures with keen and reverent dis- 



I90 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

crimination. It is revealing the duty of all 
Christian ministers and Bible teachers to 
get rid, as speedily as possible, of these 
ignorant and antiquated notions of the 
Bible, and to substitute for them conceptions 
which modern men can entertain. Above 
all things else it is proving our dependence 
on the living and ever present God. The 
war is demonstrating the futility of Bibli- 
olatry. We cannot live upon a book. No 
book can tell us all we want to know, or do 
for us all that we must have done. We are 
dependent upon God in Christ. Christ is 
the living bread which comes down from 
heaven. Unless we eat His flesh and drink 
His blood, we have no life abiding in us. 



LECTURE VI 

THE ESTIMATE OF THE WORLD 
MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 



1 



LECTURE VI 

THE ESTIMATE OF THE WORLD 
MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 

THE cause of foreign missions has 
never stood high in the esteem of 
multitudes outside the Christian 
Church, and inside the Church there have 
always been groups who have remained in- 
different to the foreign missionary appeal. 
What will be the effect of the war on our 
work for Christ in foreign lands? 

The immediate effect must, of course, be 
bad. The immediate effect of war on every- 
thing is bad. It turns many things upside 
down ; it throws not a few of the kingdoms 
of life into confusion. It retards and com- 
pletely checks various forms of good work. 
It undoes many pieces of work which have 
already been accomplished. It throws back 
reform movements. It demoralizes more 
or less the moral standards of individuals 
and of nations. It cripples the Church in 
its work of spiritual regeneration, and turns 
193 



194 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

the minds and hearts of men to physical 
preparations. It partially empties the class- 
rooms of universities, and burdens even 
wealthy institutions with deficits. Even 
business, although in certain branches 
accelerated by it, is in the long run damaged 
by it. The furious activity induced by war 
is abnormal, and, like a fever, after it has 
run its course, it leaves the patient demoral- 
ized and exhausted. Commerce is thrown 
into chaos, and the industrial world is filled 
with new conditions calling for readjust- 
ments and leading to bitter and dangerous 
contentions. War upsets everything, in- 
cluding the human heart, and, therefore, 
foreign missionary work cannot escape. 

The immediate effect of war upon foreign 
missions is more disastrous than on almost 
any other form of human activity. Chris- 
tian work done by nations at long distances 
from home is exposed to the full blast of the 
tempest. In some cases the work is badly 
damaged, and in others it is completely 
wrecked. The work of the American Board, 
for instance, in Turkey has been largely 
suspended. The work of the German Boards 
in India has been stopped. German mis- 
sionary work in all the possessions of the 
British Empire has come to an end. There 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 195 

is no missionary work done by any of the 
foreign Missionary Boards which has not 
been profoundly modified by the great war, 
and in many fields the havoc is wide-spread 
and distressing. This is the immediate 
effect away from home, and at home there 
is a sinking of heart in various circles, and 
a disposition to query whether, after all, the 
foreign missionary enterprise really pays. 
When one thinks of the forty million dollars 
expended in Turkey by the American Board 
alone, within the last hundred years, and 
looks to-day upon the bloody fields of 
ravaged Armenia, he cannot escape the 
question : Is this all which can be shown as 
the result of a century of Christian heroism 
and sacrifice? 

There are probably a few who would be 
willing to assert that the effect of the war 
on foreign missions is fatal. It would seem 
as though not for a long time would any 
Christian nation have the courage to set 
itself up in the midst of a non-Christian 
population as a teacher of love. This is a 
Christian war, that is, it arose in Christen- 
dom, and has been conducted and financed 
by so-called Christian nations. The cruel 
apparatus was all devised by men who have 
been baptized into the name of Jesus, and 



196 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

the leaders of all the belligerent nations are 
the confessed .followers of the Prince of 
Peace. It is where the Bible has been read 
longest, and where Christian prayers have 
ascended in largest number, that this hideous 
thing was born. The philosophy out of 
which the war sprang was conceived in the 
brains of so-called Christian thinkers, and 
nothing of value made use of in the war was 
fashioned by other than Christian hands. 
The only two non-Christian nations which 
have cut any considerable figure in the 
war — Turkey and Japan — were in no way 
responsible for causing the war. They 
sailed into it solely because they were lashed 
to the masts of Christian ships. It was 
Christian nations which dragged them in. 
The war has been as savagely conducted as 
any ever waged in barbaric lands. Every 
principle of right and every dictate of 
humanity has been ruthlessly trampled 
down, and the question arises. How can 
representatives of any one of these nations 
ever again gain a hearing for the Christian 
doctrine of the fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man? Surely the non- 
Christian world w'ill turn with scorn on our 
proffered message, and the taunt will be 
hurled in our teeth : " Physician, heal thy- 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 1 97 

self." When the leaders of thought in non- 
Christian lands read the story of brutalities 
and atrocities of men who were reared in 
the shadow of great Christian cathedrals and 
listen to their songs of hate, they must most 
certainly wonder why the Christian religion, 
if indeed from heaven, has been so impotent 
in shaping the minds and hearts of those 
who have so long been subjected to its 
teaching. The Christian Church has al- 
ways claimed to be a divine institution, and 
insists that it enjoys the presence of the 
omnipotent Christ, and yet, finding itself 
unable to curb the wild passions of the men 
who bow at its altars, it may fairly be chal- 
lenged when it attempts again to speak with 
authority to nations which have not yet 
confessed their allegiance to Christ. One 
would say that the Church itself must feel 
in its own heart the handicapping sense of 
inconsistency, and must find it difficult, for 
a long time to come, to open its mouth 
boldly in proclaiming in non-Christian lands 
the unsearchable riches of Christ. What 
Christendom really is will speak so loud that 
the so-called pagans will not be able to hear 
what the Christian missionaries say. 

But the situation is not so bad as it looks. 
The world is never so hopeless as super- 



198 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

ficial indications would justify us in believ- 
ing. Christians should never be daunted by 
any sky however dark, or by any tempest 
however furious. We are children of the 
day. We can gather sunbeams out of 
rolling thunder-clouds. We can sing of 
summer when the world is stiff with ice. 
The cross of Jesus was hideous to the crowd, 
but it is not hideous to us. " In the cross of 
Christ I glory towering o'er the wrecks of 
time." To the multitude the day of the 
crucifixion was black Friday. It is Good 
Friday to all believers, for on that day a 
window was opened out upon the Infinite. 
A great war cannot quench our hope, or 
cool our love, or upset our plans. We know 
that where sin abounds, much more does 
grace abound. A world-devastating, and a 
world-shattering catastrophe cannot break 
down our confidence that all will still be 
well. We know that all things work to- 
gether for good to those who love God. 
We are sure that nothing can separate us 
from the love of Christ. We know that a 
world war, vast and bloody, is not able to 
cripple permanently the mighty enterprise 
of saving men. Some day we shall find, 
long after the war is over, that in this day 
of crisis the work of foreign missions re- 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 199 

ceived a new baptism, and that a new era 
of missionary conquest was opened. 

Even though darkness broods on the face 
of the deep and many things are yet hidden 
from us, we who look carefully can already 
discern the working of forces which inspire 
hope. God moves in the darkness on the 
face of the deep. 

First of all the war is forcing upon us the 
fact that it is a small world we live in. We 
have known this before, but the world has 
constantly contracted since the war began. 
It was never so small as it is now. The map 
of it has been spread before us for nearly 
four years, and there are few regions with 
which we are not now familiar. At one 
time it was necessary for us every morning 
to take a new lesson in the geography of 
Asia; at another time we studied every day 
the Balkans; at another time we wrestled 
with the boundaries of the countries of 
Africa, and for months we have been com- 
pelled to devote ourselves daily to wide 
regions of Eastern and Western Europe. 
Recently we have had to master the topog- 
raphy of Picardy and Flanders as though 
we were General Foch. We now see the 
world as one vast plain, and it lies not far 
from our front door. The result is a 



200 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

shrivelling of the word foreign. It is drying 
up, and may some day be blown away. It 
is doubtful if it survives the present war as 
a word which may properly be applied to 
missions. Heretofore we have spoken of 
" foreign missions." The word " foreign " 
has been a stumbling block to the cause. 
It has chilled the heart, and made people 
feel they were being inveigled into some- 
thing too far away from home. But the 
war has proved to us that nothing is very 
far from our home. We used to talk about 
the " Far East," but there is no East which 
is Far. The ends of the earth are at our 
door. Every week travellers from China 
and India and Japan alight from the train 
to tell us what they have just seen and 
heard. Hereafter we shall talk about world 
work. The expression " Foreign Missions " 
will in time, I venture to predict, become 
obsolete. 

Not only is the world small, but humanity 
is one. This is an old fact, but facts often 
sink only slowly into the mind. It was 
nearly two thousand years ago that Paul 
told a crowd in the city of Athens that God 
has made of one all the nations of the earth, 
but it was many a century before Europeans 
began to talk about the " solidarity " of 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 20I 

mankind. The war is giving us revelations 
of what solidarity means. We are bound 
up together in a big bundle of life. We are 
linked together by innumerable bonds subtle 
and not to be escaped. The lives of races 
and nations are intertv^^ined and interwoven 
in a mystical way. Washington warned us 
against entangling alliances, but God has a 
way of taking things into His own hands, 
and suddenly we awake to discover that we 
are tied hand and foot by alliances that can- 
not be broken. When the first steamship 
crossed the Atlantic a new era of entangling 
alliances was opened, and the second epoch 
in that era was entered by the laying of the 
first Atlantic cable. These alliances are not 
the scheme of any statesman or cabinet, 
but the creation of science and commerce 
and travel and finance and art and industry 
and religion, the vast and complicated and 
multitudinous work of the workers of the 
world. Above the reach and power of 
political rulers and lawmakers, the threads 
of the world's life are woven into a great 
web, and we are startled one day to dis- 
cover that we are connected with the 
farthest away man on the planet. As soon 
as the war began, the effect of it made itself 
felt instantly in every capital of the world, 



202 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

and this effect has rapidly worked its way 
down into the smallest town and hamlet. In 
the wilderness of South America, in the 
desert of Africa, and in Alaska and Pata- 
gonia, things are different because of this 
war. The war has its hand on everything 
we eat and on everything we wear, and no 
nation escapes the effect of the experiences 
through which distant nations are passing. 
We have come to see that mankind is one 
colossal man, and to realize that whether 
one member suffer, all the members suffer 
with it; or one member be honoured, all the 
members rejoice with it. By one human 
spirit we are all baptized into one body, 
whether we be Europeans or Africans or 
Americans or Asiatics, we have been all 
made to drink into one spirit. 

Because the world is small and mankind 
is one, the law of mutual service becomes 
more obviously imperative. We are under 
bonds to bear one another's burdens, and to 
help one another in all the ways which are 
open. If the parable of the Good Samaritan 
is heaven's law for individuals, it must be 
heaven's law also for nations. If a nation 
falls into the clutches of a gang of bandits 
who rob it and beat it, and leave it bleeding 
and half dead, then neighbouring nations 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 203 

must come to its rescue. That is a law 
written in the human heart. When Belgium 
was crushed under the brutal feet of the 
military oHgarchy of Potsdam, Great Britain 
was constrained to rush to her assistance. 
Great Britain had no desire to enter the war. 
Her statesmen had done their utmost to 
ward off the unspeakable calamity, but 
when, in defiance of the laws of God and of 
nations, the Prussian cohorts thundered 
across the Belgian frontiers, British soldiers 
began to cross the channel. It seemed for 
a year or two as though European nations 
could be safely left to attend to the affairs 
of Europe. With Russia and France and 
Great Britain leagued together, it was 
assumed that the defeat of Germany was 
certain. But when it at last became ap- 
parent that still further resources were 
needed, then our own Republic snapped the 
traditions of a hundred years, and boldly 
flung herself into the arduous enterprise of 
creating a vast army to fight on European 
soil. Nothing but the lawlessness of the 
German war lords, and the atrocious brutal- 
ity with which they pushed forward their 
schemes, would ever have set on fire our 
peace-loving people, and consolidated all 
classes of our heterogeneous population into 



204 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

a compact phalanx bent on breaking the fury 
and power of these mailed enemies of man- 
kind. Who would have supposed even two 
years ago that public sentiment in this coun- 
try would ever support so radical a departure 
from the traditional policy of our country, 
and enter enthusiastically upon the gigantic 
task of raising an army for trans-Atlantic 
service by the policy of universal conscrip- 
tion ! It was not because we love war, for 
we do not, nor was it because we had any- 
thing of a material nature to gain, but be- 
cause, as a people, we are full of Christian 
idealism, and as soon as it was made clear 
to us that without our assistance Great 
Britain and France could not curb and con- 
trol the arch-criminal Germany, then, not 
counting the cost either in men or in money, 
we began to prepare ourselves for battle. 

In doing this we acted on the impulse 
which has been the driving force in all the 
work which the Church has tried to do in 
distant lands. What is the missionary enter- 
prise but an organized effort to give relief 
to those who need it, to rescue those whose 
rights and liberties are jeopardized, and to 
break the power of false philosophies and 
degrading superstitions? Missionaries are 
nothing but soldiers of Jesus Christ ready to 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 205 

hazard their lives in an effort to snatch cap- 
tive peoples from the clutches of their 
despoilers. Ignorance and tradition and 
superstition and low ideals are as pitiless and 
cruel as the Teutonic ravagers of Serbia 
and Poland. Large sections of the human 
race have been for countless centuries in 
bondage, trampled under the feet of ideas 
born in brains which have not had the light, 
and the mission of the Christian Church is 
nothing more nor less than to set men free 
from despotic and degrading masters. We 
have recently encouraged our sons to go to 
France, and have invoked the divine blessing 
on them, because of our great pity for the 
French and Belgian women and children, 
and our compassion on the vast multitudes 
of human beings of all ages and both sexes 
for whom this fair earth has been converted 
into a hell by the pitiless cohorts of the 
German military staff. It is pity for suffer- 
ing women and children in non-Christian 
lands which has fired the hearts of us fol- 
lowers of Jesus, and it is because of the 
compassion which has filled our hearts when 
we have in our mind's eye seen the multi- 
tudes in far-off lands scattered and torn, 
like sheep not having a shepherd, that we 
have poured our money into the missionary 



2o6 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

treasuries, and been glad to send thousands 
of our sons and daughters to dwell and 
labour among the belated populations of 
the earth. The driving force in our great 
war for the liberation of France and Belgium 
is also the driving force in that still greater 
war which the Christian Church is waging 
in every land against the vast hierarchy of 
the Empire of Evil. 

The crying need of Christian work lies 
revealed before us then with a vividness 
which it has never had before. We now see 
clearly that no section of the world can be 
safely left under the domination of un- 
christian principles. In the olden days, 
when nations were separated from one an- 
other by dividing mountains and estranging 
seas, it was possible for one nation to travel 
the downward path without jeopardizing 
the life of all the others. One nation could 
be a swamp without other nations suffering 
from the poisonous exhalations. But now 
all the nations breathe the same air, and no 
swamp anywhere can be tolerated. In olden 
times each nation was in a private room in 
the big \vorld hospital, and its disease w^as 
not readily communicated to its neighbours. 
But nowadays all nations are in a common 
ward, and every contagious disease spreads 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 207 

rapidly to all the company. Militarism, for 
instance, is one of the most contagious of all 
national diseases. No nation can be af- 
flicted with it without infecting all its neigh- 
bours. If one nation invests its money in 
the apparatus of human slaughter, and drills 
all its young men yearly in the art of war, 
then in self-defense all surrounding nations 
must adopt the same policy, and in time this 
will become the policy of the world. No 
nation lives to itself, and no nation dies to 
itself. Germany cannot have conscription 
without forcing conscription on France and 
Russia, on Switzerland and Holland. Ger- 
many cannot develop the gigantic gun 
factory of Krupp without causing similar 
factories in every country to spring up. 
Germany cannot surrender its soul to false 
ideals without it leading other nations into 
the ditch. All this is seen clearly in the 
light of the great fire. We must all go up 
together, or we shall all miserably perish. 
One nation cannot serve Caesar, and other 
nations serve Christ. One continent cannot 
worship Mars and another continent the 
God of love. America cannot remain Chris- 
tian if Asia is to remain Confucian. The 
Christian religion is for the whole world. 
If it does not claim the whole of it, then it 



208 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

will find it impossible to hold any of it. The 
field is the world, and the Christians who, 
forgetting the instructions of the IMaster, 
imagine they can cultivate only one corner 
of it, will find soon or late that all their 
labour has been in vain. Go into my vine- 
yard, the Master says, and when we lift our 
eyes to see how far the vineyard extends, we 
find its outer boundary to be the horizon of 
the world. God so loved the world. We 
must love it too. 

Another fact has been uncovered, never 
again to be lost sight of; religion and only 
religion has in it the power sufiticient to save 
the world. Much has been said in recent 
years of science, and high claims have been 
made for its power to save. Clever men 
have written fascinating magazine articles 
setting forth the superior claims of science 
as the coming saviour of the world. Not a 
few have been deceived by these false 
prophets, and have vainly imagined that the 
day of Religion is passing, and that the day 
of Science is at the door. The great war 
has revealed to us the nature of Science, and 
has pointed out to us its serious limitations. 
Science is a neutral in the realm of morality. 
It never takes sides when right or wrong 
is at stake. It invariably goes with the side 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 209 

which can best use it. It cares nothing for 
falsehood or truth, for justice or wrong? It 
knows no ethical distinctions. It fs in- 
capable of moral discrimination. It is an 
unmoral force. And this awful fact has 
emerged from the war— that a nation can be 
well versed in science, and still be an un- 
mitigated curse to mankind. It can know 
biology and chemistry and all kinds of 
engineering, and be marvellously proficient 
in higher mathematics, and still drag the 
world back into barbarism. Science has in 
it no power to soften the human heart, no 
magic to make gentle the human soul, no 
potency to humanize the human spirit. 
Bernhardi is well versed in science, but his 
book, " Germany and the Next War," could 
not be more hellish if it had been written by 
a devil. Science has a mission on the earth. 
No one would care to dispute its usefulness 
or deny its power. We need all the sciences, 
for each one of them, when held in the grip 
of a high moral purpose, becomes the 
servant of the Most High God. Science is 
not to blame for the preposterous claims 
which have been put forth for it by sundry 
of its devotees. Science is a handmaid of 
religion. Religion cannot get on well with- 
out it. Science is the servant of the moral 



2IO OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

life of mankind. But scientific instruments 
in the hands of men who have not sat at the 
feet of Jesus arc sharper than a two-edged 
sword and can be used for the assassination 
of civiHzation. Science has made it pos- 
sible for the human race to commit suicide. 
The war has demonstrated that without the 
spirit of Jesus we are lost. When men speak 
lightly of the next war they do not know 
what they are saying. The next war — if 
there be a next war — will be far worse than 
this. Invention is yet in its infancy. 
Chemistry has not revealed what it can do. 
The genius of man for making machines 
has been developed only a little. The sub- 
marine of to-day is a harmless toy com- 
pared with submarines which may yet be. 
The aeroplane is only in the chrysalis stage; 
it has not yet really learned how to fly. In 
the next war — if there be a next war — all 
the instruments of destruction will be 
developed to a power beyond our present 
dreams. Whole cities wall be blown to 
atoms by the pressing of a button, and 
civilization will end like a tale that is told. 
How shall we escape, then, if we neglect the 
salvation which has been offered? It is the 
calm statement of a scientific fact that there 
is no other name under heaven whereby we 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 211 

must be saved except the name of Jesus. 
Woe to us if we do not preach the Gospel, 
and if we do not preach it to the ends of the 
earth. Japan must become a Christian 
nation, for she has a peculiar aptitude for 
scientific knowledge, and she imitates easily 
the mechanical achievements of Western 
nations. She can readily become the Ger- 
many of the Far East. She will be a peril 
if she is not won for Christ. China is 
awakening from a long slumber. It was 
Napoleon who said that when China awoke 
she would shake the world. Everything 
depends on the ideals which are held before 
China's opening eyes. If China becomes 
Christian then the Orient is safe. At the 
beginning of the nineteenth century our 
fathers sent missionaries to the Far East 
because of their fear that the peoples there 
would after death sufifer things unspeakable 
in the fires of hell. We are moved by a 
different fear. We are not so much con- 
cerned about the hell of the world to come 
as we are about the hell which is sure to 
come in the world which now is, unless the 
nations surrender to the Son of God. So 
long as the Church used the fear of hell to 
stir men's generosity and interest, it was 
always possible for somebody to say: "I 



212 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

am not sure about that hell you talk of on 
the other side of death, and not being" sure 
of it, I do not care to sacrifice greatly for 
the missionary cause." But of the hell in 
this world there can be no doubt. Dante 
never painted woes so awful as those which 
Poland and France, and Serbia and Ar- 
menia, and Belgium have known. War is 
hell ! No sane man disputes it. But the 
next war will plunge the world into still 
deeper depths of hell. We have the re- 
ligion which when obeyed puts out all the 
flames of hell. We are debtors to the whole 
world. Unless we pay our debt we stand 
everlastingly condemned. We owe the 
whole world the revelation of the character 
of God which has come to us through Christ. 
The war is giving- us valuable hints as to 
how our world work for Christ ought to be 
planned and carried on. We have long been 
plagued by narrowness of vision. We have 
not looked at our task in a broad way. We 
have confined the Gospel to limited areas 
of life. It is only recently that preachers 
in large numbers have given themselves 
with passion to the social applications of the 
Gospel. We have been too individualistic 
in our reading of the New Testament, and 
have been content if only the individual has 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 213 

felt himself to be saved. But the social ap- 
plications have never been carried as far as 
they ought to be, and as they are going to 
be through the coming generations. Chris- 
tianity is a religion whose field is the world. 
Its principles are applicable to all the 
provinces of human life. Every kingdom 
of thought and activity must be claimed 
boldly for Christ. The Golden Rule is for 
nations as well as individuals, and the law 
of forgiveness and patience and service is 
for Republics and Empires as well as for 
Bible teachers and missionaries. The pulpit 
has long wrapped the Gospel round the 
home, and here and there it has wrapped 
it round the town, but the time has come to 
wrap it round the nation, and round the 
entire globe. Diplomats and statesmen are 
servants of God, and all of His servants are 
under the laws announced by Christ. This 
war was caused by a refusal of the servants 
of the State to obey the laws taught by the 
servants of the Church. Statesmen have 
built their house upon the sand, and when 
the storm came the house fell, and great was 
the fall of it. We shall never have an abid- 
ing peace until all the kingdoms of this 
world become Christ's kingdom. We must 
put all the crowns upon His head. 



214 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

For this mighty work we must mobilize 
all of our resources. The State is showing 
us how to do it. In time of war men reaUze 
that every ounce of energy is needed. War 
lays before the mind gigantic tasks, and 
without the forthputting of all the nation's 
strength these tasks cannot be accom- 
plished. Now the Church of Christ is al- 
ways engaged in war. It is a church mili- 
tant. Its business is pulling down the 
strongholds of evil, and freeing men from 
the bondage which destroys the joy which 
belongs to the children of God. The work 
is vast and arduous, and every man and 
every woman is needed, and also every 
child. The war has called into service every 
class of our population. The women are no 
less indispensable than the men. Without 
their aid the war could not be won. The 
children also do things which without them 
would remain undone. They are able to 
increase not only the sale of Liberty Bonds, 
but also the stock of the nation's food, and 
the number of garments which we ship 
abroad. The missionary enterprise for 
many years appealed largely to small groups 
of women. Women's missionary societies 
have for a long time flourished all over the 
land, but it was only a decade or two ago 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 215 

that laymen in large numbers began to think 
seriously of this work, and to organize them- 
selves for the doing of it. The boys and 
girls in many churches have not yet been 
fnvited to come in, and to share with their 
elders the great work of the world s redemp- 
tion But the war will accelerate this 
widening constituency of foreign missions. 
More women will come in, and stiU more 
men, and still more children, and the mis- 
sionary interest, instead of being confined to 
limited groups of the more faithful women, 
will take possession more and more of the 
entire Christian brotherhood, and to push 
forward Christ's work in distant lands w.U 
be considered as essential to the hfe of a 
congregation as the carrying out of its own 

local program. 

We are getting valuable side-lights upon 
the value and uses of money. We have 
been somewhat picayunish in our financial 
calculations. We have dealt too much m 
small figures. We have been intunHlated 
by the e.Kpensiveness of foreign missionary 
enterprises. We have hesitated to ask for 
still larger sums. But the State is showing 
what it means to open the mouth boldly m 

asking for money. War is an expensive 
undertaking. No one thinks of using sums 



2l6 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

in two figures, or in three, or in four, not 
even in five or six or seven, nor in eight or 
nine. When we think of war we begin at 
once to think and talk in billions, and no one 
is affrighted by the big figures, because we 
know that the worth of justice and liberty 
is beyond price. What matters it what it 
costs to put down tyranny and cruelty, to 
make it possible for men to live in happiness 
and peace? After we have made tremen- 
dous sacrifices, we are still willing to say 
with Lowell : 

" What were our lives without thee ? 

What all our lives to save thee ? 

We reck not what we gave thee ; 

We will not dare to doubt Ihee, 
But ask whatever else, and we will dare." 

Shall a Christian say less to the Church 
than to the State? Shall the State be 
counted more worthy of being trusted than 
the Church of God? Shall the prosperity 
of the State be deemed of higher moment 
than the prosperity of the Church? Why, 
then, should we listen undaunted to the 
State asking for billions of dollars, and 
wince and rebel when the Church asks only 
for millions? Our rich Christians, as a rule, 
have never yet begun to give to world work 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 21 7 

as generously as they ought, and the poor 
people, on the whole, have never yet learned 
the joy of giving out of their poverty for the 
advancement of Christ's cause in far-aw^ay 
lands. Many a poor man feels it is an im- 
position for the Church to ask him to help 
foreign missions; and many a rich man ex- 
pends every year on luxuries ten times his 
annual contribution to the missionary cause. 
In time of war it is conceded to be a right 
principle that men shall contribute to the 
State according to their incomes. Why 
should they not give to the Church on the 
same principle? If the Church is at war 
with the hierarchy of evil, if it has gone 
forth to attack and lay low ideas and ideals 
which make havoc of the peace of human 
hearts and the happiness of homes, why 
should not every follower of Jesus give ac- 
cording to his income for the support of this 
momentous and costly work? It is those 
who count the nickels and dimes taken up 
in a collection for foreign missions who 
realize most keenly how niggardly many 
Christians are when it comes to making 
sacrifices for the greatest piece of work 
Christ has given us to do. If by our gifts 
we should make our foreign work more ex- 
tensive, the very size of it would thrill our 



2l8 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

hearts and open up new fountains of 
generosity. During the war the Rocke- 
feller Foundation has been doing gigantic 
bits of Christian work. To see it spending 
now a million dollars in Serbia, and now a 
million in Poland, and now a million in Bel- 
gium, and now millions in other fields, meet- 
ing great needs in a great way, combating 
appalling situations with unstinted opulence, 
awes the heart and gives us revelations of 
what money is able to accomplish when used 
by hands which have been consecrated to 
the service of the Son of God. 

If the Church would spend more in doing 
the work of Christ, the people would be 
called upon by the State to give less in the 
attainment of its ends. On our South- 
western border lies a nation in sore need of 
missionary aid. For centuries its priests 
have been ignorant and its civil rulers 
tyrannical and corrupt. There is nothing 
IMexico needs so much as Christian knowl- 
edge. She needs a great army of teachers. 
Her people are for the most part ignorant 
of the laws of life. They need to be taught 
the principles of Jesus. But what through all 
these generations have we done for Mexico? 
Some of our capitalists have exploited 
diligently Mexican resources. Syndicates 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 219 

have gotten possession of many of her oil 
wells and mines. Our millionaires have 
raked out her coal and copper, her silver and 
her gold, making the United States richer 
year by year. Corporations owning prop- 
erty in Mexico have declared rich dividends 
for our American investors. What in re- 
turn have we done for Mexico? Pick up a 
book containing the record of missionary 
work in Mexico, carried on by representa- 
tives of our United States churches, and 
what a humiliating story ! Like Dives we 
have dressed in fine linen and fared sumptu- 
ously every day, and Lazarus has been 
allowed to lie uncared for at our gate. And 
the result is that at times Mexico has been 
exceedingly troublesome. Now and then 
she has become a peril. She has disturbed 
our peace, and vexed our patience, and not 
long ago it was necessary to send an army 
there to safeguard our rights. Because we 
had refused to send an army with ideas, it 
was necessary to send an army with guns. 
For a while, our army in Mexico cost us 
$177,000 a day, more in one day than doul)le 
the amount spent in an entire year by the 
two denominations of our country which are 
doing most for the moral uplift of Mexico. 
Congress voted a hundred and thirty million 



220 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

dollars to cover our military expenses for six 
months in dealing with Mexico. A Chris- 
tian nation which is not willing to invest in 
Christian teachers will soon or late be com- 
pelled to invest its money in soldiers. If 
we refuse to build Mexicans up, then the 
time comes when we must use our treasure 
in shooting Mexicans down. The only way 
to banish the necessity for armies is to fill 
the minds and hearts of all nations with the 
ideas of Christ. He is our Peace. 

Another lesson is being forced upon us. 
We must grasp the principle of cooperation. 
Only by working together can we accom- 
plish the task before us. The State is 
teaching us the power of this neglected prin- 
ciple. All the newspapers dwell upon it 
constantly — the necessity of working to- 
gether. No department can be allowed to 
w^ork alone. No agency can be independent 
of all others. There must be a coordination 
of all our movements if the vast enterprise 
is not to crumple and break down. It is 
only a united nation which has any chance 
of victory in a war. Any manifestation of 
the spirit of schism is alarming, and is 
snufYed out by rigorous measures at the 
start. In time of war we must keep step to 
the music of the union. That is essential 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 221 

also in the fighting of our great world battle. 
The Christian Church has been rendered 
largely impotent for the accomplishment of 
many stupendous tasks by its lamentable 
and interminable divisions. It is time for 
the Christian army to close up its ranks. 
Christians of all names must come closer to 
one another. The days for mutual suspicion 
and antagonism are gone. The day for 
enthusiastic cooperation is at hand. Who 
knows what miracles of consolidation, what 
undreamed-of reunions are coming to the 
world out of this desolating and immeasur- 
able affliction? 

The war is teaching us to place physical 
comfort where it belongs and is giving us a 
more Christian estimate of death. We have 
always made too much of physical comfort, 
and we have given to death a place to which 
it is not entitled. Christianity makes light 
of comfort, and puts physical death under 
its feet. Christ, in sending out His disciples 
to preach, exhorted them not to be afraid of 
death. He told them that some of them 
would be called to lay down their lives, but 
He urged them never to run away from 
death. Any man can afiford to die if by his 
dying he makes the world better. This 
attitude has been accepted by the Christian 



222 OLD TRUTHS AND NEW FACTS 

Church as the only attitude which is worthy 
of Jesus Christ. We have sent our mis- 
sionaries into all kinds of tribulations and 
dangers. We have allowed them to go to 
savage countries and to cannibal islands, 
well-nigh certain that some of them would 
never come back. But there have always 
been among us the timid hearted, and those 
who have made too great an ado about 
calamities which have overtaken workers in 
the foreign field. A Boxer insurrection in 
China, or a Mohammedan massacre in Ar- 
menia has been able to sow doubts in many 
a mind as to the wisdom of subjecting our 
brothers and sisters to such appalling risks. 
But the war is taking away the fear of death. 
The State has no hesitancy in asking men to 
die. It is not daunted when they die by the 
hundred or thousand or million. When 
great ends are at stake nobody thinks of 
death. Over the ground reddened by the 
blood of the slain other men will march for- 
ward to victory. It is inconceivable that 
any nation fighting for its liberty and life 
should ever be daunted by the sight of 
blood. The soldiers of Jesus must not be 
a whit less courageous than the soldiers of 
the State. Men must fight for the Church 
no less valiantly than for the Government. 



WORLD MISSION OF CHRISTIANITY 223 

If the State is willing to sacrifice its tens of 
thousands and its millions, the Church must 
not draw back at the sight of sacrifices which 
must be made if Jesus is to become Lord 
of all. 

" The Son of God goes forth to war, 
A kingly crown to gain ; 
His blood red banner streams afar: 
Who follows in His train? 

" A noble army, men and boys, 
The matron and the maid. 
Around the throne of God rejoice, 
In robes of light arrayed. 

" They climbed the steep ascent of heaven 
Through peril, toil, and pain; 
O God, to us may grace be given 
To follow in their train." 



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